


something in my heart told me I must have you

by bohemian



Series: it turned out so right, for strangers in the night [1]
Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: 1940s, Alpha/Beta/Omega Dynamics, Alternate Universe - Book/Movie Fusion, Minor Character Death, Multi, Omega Stiles Stilinski, Writer Derek
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-11
Updated: 2016-03-06
Packaged: 2018-05-01 03:22:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 14
Words: 20,881
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5190227
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bohemian/pseuds/bohemian
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Stiles is the omega never meant to be caged.</p><p>Derek loved him when he kept playing the same song on his guitar, loved him when he was another alpha's mate, loved him when he abandoned his life over and over again, and loved him when he tried to abandon the alpha as well.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This fic is just a recycled Breakfast at Tiffany's novella with some bits added/removed, a twisted timeline, a/b/o AU, TW characters and references, Holly (Stiles) being a bit more of a pleasant person and a different ending.
> 
> You don't need to know anything about the novella/film to read this.
> 
> The title is from the song Strangers in the Night.

Derek had been living in the house about a week when he noticed that the mailbox belonging to Apt. 2 had a name slot fitted with a curious card. Printed, rather Cartier-formal, it read: _Omega Stiles Stilinski_ ; and, underneath, in the corner, _Traveling_. It nagged the alpha like a tune: _Stiles Stilinski, Traveling_. 

 

One night, it was long past twelve, Derek woke up at the sound of Mr. Daehler calling down the stairs. Since he lived on the top floor, his voice fell through the whole house, exasperated and stern. "Omega Stilinski! I must protest!"

The voice that came back, welling up from the bottom of the stairs, was silly-young and self-amused. "Oh, darling, I am sorry. I lost the goddamn key."

"You cannot go on ringing my bell. You must please, please have yourself a key made."

"But I lose them all."

"I work, I have to sleep," Mr. Daehler shouted. "But you're always ringing my bell…"

"Oh, don't be angry: I won't do it again. And if you promise not to be angry"—his voice was coming nearer, he was climbing the stairs—"I might let you take those pictures we mentioned."

By now Derek had left his bed and opened the door an inch. He could hear Mr. Daehler's silence: hear, because it was accompanied by an audible change of breath.

"When?" he said.

The omega laughed. "Sometime," he answered, slurring the word.

"Anytime," Daehler said and closed his door.

Derek went out into the hall and leaned over the banister, just enough to see without being seen. The omega was still on the stairs, now he reached the landing, and the colors of his tousled hair, strands of dark brown, caught the hall light. For all his chic thinness, he had an almost breakfast-cereal air of health, a soap and lemon cleanness, a rough pink darkening in the cheeks. His mouth was large, his nose upturned. A pair of dark glasses blotted out his eyes. It was a face beyond childhood, yet this side of belonging to a man. Derek thought him anywhere between sixteen and twenty-five; as it turned out, he was shy two months of his nineteenth birthday.

He was not alone. There was an alpha following behind him. The way his plump hand clutched at the omega's hip seemed somehow improper; if not morally, aesthetically. He was short and vast, sun-lamped and pomaded, a man in a buttressed pin-stripe suit with a red carnation withering in the lapel. When they reached the omega's door he rummaged his pockets in search of a key and took no notice of the fact that the alpha's thick lips were nuzzling the nape of his neck. At last, though, finding the key and opening his door, he turned to the alpha cordially: "Bless you, darling—you were sweet to see me home."

"Hey, baby!" he said, for the door was closing in his face.

"Yes, Harry?"

"Harry was the other guy. I'm Sid. Sid Arbuck. You like me."

"I worship you, Mr. Arbuck. But good night, Mr. Arbuck."

Mr. Arbuck stared with disbelief as the door shut firmly. "Hey, baby, let me in, baby. You like me, baby. I'm a liked guy. Didn't I pick up the check, five people, your friends, I never seen them before? Don't that give me the right you should like me? You like me, baby." He tapped on the door gently, then louder; finally, he took several steps back, his body hunched and lowering, as though he meant to charge it, crash it down. Instead, he plunged down the stairs, slamming a fist against the wall. Just as he reached the bottom, the door of the omega's apartment opened and he poked out his head.

"Oh, Mr. Arbuck ... "

The alpha turned back, a smile of relief oiling his face: the omega had only been teasing.

"The next time an omega wants a little powder-room change," he called, not teasing at all, "take my advice, darling: don't give them twenty cents!"

 

***

The omega kept his promise to Mr. Daehler; or so Derek assumed, for in the next days he started ringing Derek's bell, sometimes at two in the morning, three and four: he had no qualms at what hour he got the alpha out of bed to push the buzzer that released the downstairs door. As Derek had few friends and none who would come around so late, he always knew that it was the omega. But on the first occasions of its happening, Derek went to his door, half-expecting bad news, a telegram; and Omega Stilinski would call up: "Sorry, darling—I forgot my key."

Of course, they'd never met. Though actually, on the stairs, in the street, they often came face-to-face; but he seemed not quite to see Derek. The omega was never without dark glasses, he was always well groomed, there was a consequential good taste in the plainness of his clothes, the blues and grays and lack of luster that made him, himself, shine so. One might have thought him a photographer's model, perhaps a young actor, except that it was obvious, judging from his hours, he hadn't time to be either.

 

Now and then Derek ran across him outside their neighborhood. Once a visiting relative took him to "21", and there, at a superior table, surrounded by four alphas, none of them Mr. Arbuck, yet all of them interchangeable with him, was Omega Stilinski, idly combing his hair; and his expression, an unrealized yawn, put, by example, a dampener, on the excitement Derek felt over dining at such a swanky place. Another night, deep in the summer, the heat of Derek's room sent him out into the streets. He walked down Third Avenue to Fifty-first Street, where there was an antique store with an object in its window he admired: a palace of a birdcage, a mosque of minarets and bamboo rooms yearning to be filled with talkative parrots. But the price was three hundred and fifty dollars. On the way home the alpha noticed a cab-driver crowd gathered in front of P. J. Clark's saloon, apparently attracted there by a happy group of whiskey-eyed Australian army officers baritoning, "Waltzing Matilda." As they sang they took turns spin-dancing an omega over the cobbles under the El; and the omega, Stiles Stilinski, to be sure, floated around in their, arms light as a scarf.

But if Omega Stilinski remained unconscious of Derek's existence, except as a doorbell convenience, Derek became, through the summer, rather an authority on the omega. Derek discovered, from observing the trash-basket outside the omega's door, that his regular reading consisted of tabloids and travel folders and astrological charts; that he smoked an esoteric cigarette called Picayunes; survived on apples and curly fries. The same source made it evident that he received letters by the bale. They were always torn into strips like bookmarks. Derek used to occasionally pluck himself a bookmark in passing. _Remember_ and _miss you_ and _rain_ and _please write_ and _damn_ and _goddamn_ were the words that recurred most often on these slips; those, and _lonesome_ and _love_.

Also, he had a cat and played the guitar. On days when the sun was strong, he would wash his hair, and together with the cat, a red tiger-striped tom, sit out on the fire escape thumbing a guitar while his hair dried. Whenever Derek heard the music, he would go stand quietly by his window. The omega played very well and sometimes sang too. Sang in the hoarse, breaking tones of a boy's adolescent voice. He knew all the show hits, Cole Porter and Kurt Weill; especially he liked the songs from _Oklahoma!_ , which were new that summer and everywhere. But there were moments when he played songs that made you wonder where he learned them, where indeed he came from. Harsh-tender wandering tunes with words that smacked of piney woods or prairie. One went: _Don't wanna sleep, Don't wanna die, Just wanna go a-travelin' through the pastures of the sky_ ; and this one seemed to gratify him the most, for often he continued it long after his hair had dried, after the sun had gone and there were lighted windows in the dusk.

But their acquaintance did not make headway until September, an evening with the first ripple-chills of autumn running through it. Derek had been to a movie, come home and gone to bed with a bourbon nightcap and the newest Simenon: so much his idea of comfort that he couldn't understand a sense of unease that multiplied until he could hear his heart beating. It was a feeling he'd read about, written about, but never before experienced. The feeling of being watched. Of someone in the room. Then: an abrupt rapping at the window, a glimpse of ghostly gray: Derek spilled the bourbon. It was some little while before the alpha could bring himself to open the window and ask Omega Stilinski what he wanted.


	2. Chapter 2

"I've got the most terrifying man downstairs," the omega said, stepping off the fire escape into the room. "I mean he's sweet when he isn't drunk, but let him start lapping up the vino, and oh god quel beast! If there's one thing I loathe, it's alphas who try to claim you without any permission." He loosened a gray flannel robe off his shoulder, showing Derek some scratches on his pale shoulder. The robe was all he was wearing.

"I'm sorry if I frightened you. But when the beast got so tiresome I just went out the window. I think he thinks I'm in the bathroom, not that I give a damn what he thinks, the hell with him, he'll get tired, he'll go to sleep, my god he should, eight martinis before dinner and enough wine to wash an elephant. Listen, you can throw me out if you want to. I've got a gall barging in on you like this. But that fire escape was damned icy. And you looked so cozy. Like my brother Scott. We used to sleep in the same bed, and he was the only one that ever let me hug him on a cold night."

He'd come completely into the room now, and he paused there, staring at Derek. The alpha had never seen him not wearing dark glasses, and it was obvious now that they were prescription lenses, for without them the omega had an assessing squint, like a jeweler's. The large eyes, their color just like Derek's bourbon, gave out a lively warm light.

"I suppose you think I'm very brazen. Or très fou. Or something."

"Not at all."

The omega seemed disappointed. "Yes, you do. Everybody does. I don't mind. It's useful." He sat down on one of the rickety red-velvet chairs, curved his legs underneath him, and glanced around the room, his eyes puckering more pronouncedly. "How can you bear it? It's a chamber of horrors."

"Oh, you get used to anything," Derek said, annoyed with himself, for not matching the omega's tastes with his little den.

"I don't. I'll never get used to anything. Anybody that does, they might as well be dead." His dispraising eyes surveyed the room again. "What do you do here all day?"

Derek motioned toward a table tall with books and paper. "Write things."

"I thought writers were quite old. Of course, Saroyan isn't old. I met him at a party, and really he isn't old at all. In fact," the omega mused, "if he'd give himself a closer shave... by the way, is Hemingway old?"

"In his forties, I should think."

"That's not bad. I usually can't get excited by a man until he's forty-two. I know this idiot girl who keeps telling me I ought to go to a head-shrinker; she says I have a father complex. Which is so much merde. I simply trained myself to like older men, and it was the smartest thing I ever did. How old is W. Somerset Maugham?"

"I'm not sure. Sixty-something."

"That's not bad. I've never been to bed with a writer yet. No, wait: do you know Benny Shacklett?" he frowned when Derek shook his head. "That's funny. He's written an awful lot of radio stuff. But quel rat. Tell me, are you a real writer?"

"It depends on what you mean by real."

"Well, Alpha, does anyone buy what you write?"

"Not yet."

"I'm going to help you," he said. "I can, too. Think of all the people I know who know people. I'm going to help you because you reminded me of my brother Scott. I haven't seen him since I was fourteen, that's when I left home. He really liked peanut butter. Everybody thought it was dotty, the way he gorged himself on peanut butter; he didn't care about anything in this world except animals and peanut butter. But he wasn't dotty, just sweet and vague and terribly slow; he'd been in the same grade for two years when I ran away. Poor Scott. I wonder if he still eats a lot of peanut butter. Which reminds me, I'm starving."

Derek pointed to a bowl of apples, the alpha part of him secretly glad that he could feed the omega, and asked him how and why he'd left home so young. Stiles looked at Derek blankly, and rubbed his nose, as though it tickled: a gesture, seeing often repeated, Derek came to recognize as a signal that one was trespassing. Like many people with a bold fondness for volunteering intimate information, anything that suggested a direct question, a pinning-down, put the omega on guard. He took a bite of an apple and said: "Tell me something you've written. The story part."

"That's one of the troubles. They're not the kind of stories you can tell."

"Too dirty?" the omega smirked.

"Maybe I'll let you read one sometime."

"Whiskey and apples go together. Fix me a drink, Alpha. Then you can read me a story yourself."

Very few authors, especially the unpublished, can resist an invitation to read aloud. Derek made them both a drink and, settling in a chair opposite, began to read, his voice a little shaky with a combination of stage fright and enthusiasm: it was a new story, he'd finished it the day before, and that inevitable sense of shortcoming had not had time to develop. It was about two omega women who share a house, schoolteachers, one of whom, when the other becomes engaged, spreads with anonymous notes a scandal that prevents the marriage. As Derek read, each glimpse he stole of Stiles made his heart contract. The omega fidgeted. He picked apart the butts in an ashtray, he mooned over his fingernails, though Derek still seemed to have his attention.

"Is that the end?" he asked when Derek finished. He floundered for something more to say. "Of course I like dykes themselves. But stories about dykes bore the bejesus out of me. Well really, Alpha," he said, because Derek was clearly puzzled, "if it's not about a couple of old dykes, what the hell is it about?"

But Derek was in no mood to explain his story, already fond of the omega's new bizarre perspective.

"Incidentally," the omega said, "do you happen to know any nice omega dykes? I'm looking for a roommate. Well, don't laugh. I'm so disorganized, I simply can't afford a maid; and really, some omegas are wonderful homemakers, you never have to bother about brooms and defrosting and sending out the laundry. I had a dyke roommate in Hollywood, she played in Westerns, they called her the Lone Ranger, but I'll say this for her, she was better than an alpha around the house. Of course, people couldn't help but think I must be a bit of a dyke myself. And of course, I am. Everyone is a bit. So what? That never discouraged an alpha yet, in fact, it seems to goad them on. Look at the Lone Ranger, married twice. Usually, omega dykes only get married once, just for the name. It seems to carry such cachet, later on, to be called Mrs. Something Another. That's not true!" he was staring at an alarm clock on the table. "It can't be four-thirty!"

The window was turning blue. A sunrise breeze bandied the curtains. "What is today?"

"Thursday."

"Thursday." He stood up. "My God," he said and sat down again with a moan. "It's too gruesome."

Derek was tired enough not to be curious. He laid down on the bed and closed his eyes. Still, it was irresistible: "What's gruesome about Thursday?"

"Nothing. Except that, I can never remember when it's coming. You see, on Thursdays, I have to catch the eight forty-five. They're so particular about visiting hours, so if you're there by ten that gives you an hour before the poor men eat lunch. Think of it, lunch at eleven. You can go at two, and I'd so much rather, but he likes me to come in the morning, he says it sets him up for the rest of the day. I've got to stay awake," he said, pinching his cheeks until the roses came, "there isn't time to sleep, I'd look consumptive, I'd sag like a tenement, and that wouldn't be fair: an omega can't go to [Sing Sing](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sing_Sing) with a green face."

"I suppose not."

"All the visitors do make an effort to look their best, and it's very tender, it's sweet as hell, the way the omegas wear their prettiest everything, I mean the old ones and the really poor ones too, they make the dearest effort to look nice and smell nice too, and I love them for it. I love the kids too, especially the colored ones. I mean the pups the wives bring. It should be sad, seeing the kids there, but it isn't, they have ribbons in their hair and lots of shine on their shoes, you'd think there was going to be ice cream; and sometimes that's what it's like in the visitors' room, a party. Anyway, it's not like the movies: you know, grim whisperings through a grille. There isn't any grille, just a counter between you and them, and the kids can stand on it to be hugged; all you have to do to kiss somebody is lean across. What I like most, they're so happy to see each other, they've saved up so much to talk about, it isn't possible to be dull, they keep laughing and holding hands. It's different afterward," he said. "I see them on the train. They sit so quiet watching the river go by." He stretched a strand of hair to the corner of his eye and played with it thoughtfully. "I'm keeping you awake. Go to sleep."

"Please. I'm interested."

"I know you are. That's why I want you to go to sleep. Because if I keep on, I'll tell you about Deucalion. I'm not sure that would be quite cricket." He brushed his fingers through his hair. "They never told me not to tell anyone. In so many words. And it is funny. Maybe you could put it in a story with different names and whatnot. Listen, Alpha," he said, reaching for another apple, "Well," he said, with a mouthful of apple, "you may have read about him in the papers. His name is Deucalion, and he's a darling old man, terribly pious. He'd look like a monk if it weren't for his eyes; he says he prays for me every night. Of course, he was never my lover; as far as that goes, I never knew him until he was already in jail. But I adore him now, after all, I've been going to see him every Thursday for seven months, and I think I'd go even if he didn't pay me. This one's mushy," he said and aimed the rest of the apple out the window. "By the way, I did know Deucalion by sight. He used to come to Boyd's bar, the one around the corner: never talked to anybody, just stand there, like the kind of man who lives in hotel rooms. But it's funny to remember back and realize how closely he must have been watching me, because right after they sent him up along came this telegram from a lawyer. It said to contact him immediately for information to my advantage."

"You thought somebody had left you a million?" The alpha asked with amusement.

"Not at all. I figured Bergdorf was trying to collect. But I took the gamble and went to see this lawyer, if he is a lawyer, which I doubt, since he doesn't seem to have an office, just an answering service, and he asked me how I'd like to cheer up a lonely old man, at the same time pick up a hundred a week. I told him 'look, darling, you've got the wrong Omega Stilinski, I'm not a nurse that does tricks on the side'. I wasn't impressed by the honorarium either; you can do as well as that on trips to the powder room: any gent with the slightest chic will give you fifty for the omega's john, and I always ask for cab fare too, that's another fifty. But then he told me his client was Deucalion. He said the dear old man had long admired me à la distance, so wouldn't it be a good deed if I went to visit him once a week. Well, I couldn't: it was too romantic."

"I don't know. It doesn't sound right."

The omega smiled. "You think I'm lying?"

"For one thing, they can't simply let anyone visit a prisoner."

"Oh, they don't. In fact, they make quite a boring fuss. I'm supposed to be his nephew."

"And it's as simple as that? For an hour's conversation he gives you a hundred dollars?"

"He doesn't, the lawyer does. Mr. Ennis mails it to me in cash as soon as I leave the weather report."

"I think you could get into a lot of trouble," Derek said, and switched off a lamp; there was no need of it now, morning was in the room and pigeons were gargling on the fire escape.

"How?" he said seriously.

"There must be something in the law books about false identity. After all, you're not his nephew. And what about this weather report?"

The omega patted a yawn. "But it's nothing. Just messages I leave with the answering service so Mr. Ennis will know for sure that I've been up there. Deucalion tells me what to say, things like, oh, 'there's a hurricane in Cuba' and 'it's snowing in Palermo.' Don't worry, Alpha," he said, moving to the bed, "I've taken care of myself a long time." The morning light seemed refracted through him: as he pulled the bed covers up to Derek's chin he gleamed like a transparent child; then he laid down close beside the alpha. "Do you mind? I only want to rest a moment. So let's don't say another word. Go to sleep." Derek pretended to, made his breathing heavy and regular, inhaling the omega's sweet scent. Bells in the tower of the next-door church rang the half-hour, the hour. It was six when the omega put his hand on Derek's arm, a fragile touch careful not to waken. "Poor Scott," he whispered, and it seemed he was speaking to Derek, but he was not. "Where are you, Scott? Because it's cold. There's snow in the wind." His cheek came to rest against Derek's shoulder, a warm damp weight.

"Why are you crying?"

The omega sprang back, sat up. "Oh, for God's sake," he said, starting for the window and the fire escape, "I hate snoops."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So much dialogue. And yeah, I have no clue what I'm even doing with this fic.
> 
> Homosexuality in this AU means alpha/alpha or omega/omega relationships.


	3. Chapter 3

The next day, Friday, Derek came home to find outside his door a grand-luxe Charles & Co. basket with the omega's card:  _Omega Stiles Stilinski, Traveling_ : and scribbled on the back in a freakishly awkward, kindergarten hand:  _Bless you darling Alpha. Please forgive the other night. You were an angel about the whole thing. Mille tendresse —Stiles. P.S. I won't bother you again._

 

Derek replied, _Please do_ , and left this note at the omega's door with what he could afford, a bunch of street-vendor violets. But apparently he'd meant what he said; Derek neither saw nor heard from him, and Derek gathered he'd gone so far as to obtain a downstairs key. At any rate, he no longer rang the alpha's bell. Derek missed that; and as the days merged he began to feel certain far-fetched resentments as if he were being neglected by his mate. A disquieting loneliness came into the alpha's life, but it induced no hunger for friends of longer acquaintance: they seemed now like a salt-free, sugarless diet. By Wednesday worrying thoughts of Stiles, of Sing Sing and Deucalion, of worlds where men forked over fifty dollars for the powder room, were so constant that Derek couldn't work. That night he left a message in the omega's mailbox:  _Tomorrow is Thursday_. The next morning rewarded Derek with a second note in the play-pen script:  _Bless you for reminding me. Can you stop for a drink tonight 6-ish?_

 

***

Derek waited until ten past six, then made himself delay five minutes more. A strawberry blonde alpha answered the door. She smelled of cigars and perfume. "Stiles is in the shower," she said, motioning a cigar toward a sound of water hissing in another room. The room in which they stood (they were standing because there was nothing to sit on) seemed as though it were being just moved into; you expected to smell wet paint. Suitcases and unpacked crates were the only furniture. The crates served as tables. One supported the mixings of a martini; another a lamp, a Libertyphone, Stiles' red cat and a bowl of yellow roses. Bookcases, covering one wall, boasted a half-shelf of literature. Derek warmed to the room at once, liked its fly-by-night look.

The woman cleared her throat. "Are you expected?" She found Derek's nod uncertain. Her cold eyes operated on him, made neat, exploratory incisions. "A lot of characters come here, they're not expected. Have you known Stiles for a long time?"

"Not very."

"So you don't know him?"

"I live upstairs." The answer seemed to explain enough to relax her.

"You got the same layout?"

"Much smaller."

She tapped ash on the floor. "This is a dump. This is unbelievable. But Stiles' wouldn't know how to live even if he's had the money." she snorted "So," she said, "what do you think: is he or isn't he?"

"Is he what?"

"A phony."

"I wouldn't have thought so."

"You're wrong. He is a phony. But on the other hand, you're right. He isn't a phony because he's a real phony. He believes all this crap he believes. You can't talk him out of it. I've tried with tears running down my cheeks. Theo Raeken, respected everywhere, Theo Raeken tried. Theo had it on his mind to marry him, Theo spent maybe thousands sending him to head-shrinkers. Even the famous one, the one can only speak German, boy, did he throw in the towel. You can't talk Stiles out of these"—she made a fist, as though to crush an intangible—" ideas. Try it sometime. Get him to tell you some of the stuff he believes. Mind you," she said, "I like Stiles. Everybody does, but there are lots that don't. I do. I sincerely like him. I'm sensitive, that's why. You've got to be sensitive to appreciate him: a streak of the poet. But I'll tell you the truth. You can beat your brains out for him, and he'll hand you horseshit on a platter. To give an example—who is he like you see him today? He's strictly an omega you'll read where he ends up at the bottom of a bottle of Seconals. I've seen it happen more times than you've got toes: and those omegas, they weren't even nuts. He's nuts."

"But young. And with a great deal of youth ahead of him."

"If you mean future, you're wrong again. Now a couple of years back, out on the Coast, there was a time it could've been different. He had something working for him, he had them interested, he could've really rolled. But when you walk out on a thing like that, you don't walk back. Ask Luise Rainer. And Rainer was a star. Sure, Stiles was no star; he never got out of the still department. But that was before  _The Story of Dr. Wassell_. Then he could've really rolled. I know, see, cause I'm the one who was giving Stiles the push." She pointed her cigar at herself. "Lydia Martin." She expected recognition, and Derek didn't mind obliging her, it was all right by him, except he'd never heard of Lydia Martin. It developed that she was a Hollywood actor's agent. 

"I'm the first one who saw him. Out at Santa Anita. He's hanging around the track every day. I'm interested: professionally. I find out he's some jock's regular, he's living with the shrimp. I get the jock told Drop It if he doesn't want the vice squad boys after him: see, the kid's fifteen. But stylish: he's okay, he comes across. Even when he's wearing glasses this thick; even when he opens his mouth and you don't know if he's a hillbilly or an Okie or what. I still don't. My guess, nobody will ever know where he came from. He's such a goddamn liar, maybe he doesn't know himself anymore. But it took us a year to fix that. How we did it finally: we gave him French lessons: after he could imitate French, it wasn't so long he could imitate English. We modeled his along the Omega Margaret Sullavan type, but he could pitch some curves of his own, people were interested, big ones, and to top it all, Theo Raeken, a respected guy, Theo wants to marry him. Could an agent ask for more? Then wham!  _The Story of Dr. Wassell_. You see that picture? Cecil B. DeMille. Gary Cooper. Jesus. I kill myself, it's all set: they're going to test Stiles for the part of Dr. Wassell's nurse. One of his nurses, anyway. Then wham! The phone rings." She picked a telephone out of the air and held it to her ear. "He says, this is Stiles, I say, honey, you sound far away, he says I'm in New York, I say what the hell are you doing in New York when it's Sunday and you got the test tomorrow? He says I'm in New York cause I've never been to New York. I say get your ass on a plane and get back here, he says I don't want it. I say what's your angle, doll? He says you got to want it to be good and I don't want it. See what I mean: horseshit on a platter."

The red cat jumped off its crate and rubbed against her leg. She lifted the cat on the toe of her shoe and gave him a toss, which was hateful of her except she seemed not aware of the cat but merely her own irritableness.

"This is what he wants?" she said, flinging out her arms. "A lot of characters that aren't expected? Living off tips. Running around with bums. So maybe he could marry Greenberg? You should pin a medal on him for that?" She waited, glaring.

"Sorry, I don't know him."

"If you don't know Greenberg, you can't know much about Stiles. Bad deal," she said, her tongue clucking in her mouth. "I was hoping you maybe had influence. Could level with him before it's too late."

"But according to you, it already is."

She blew a smoke ring, let it fade before she smiled; the smile altered her face, made something gentle happen. "I could get it rolling again. Like I told you," she said, and now it sounded true, "I sincerely like the kid."

"What scandals are you spreading, Lyds?" Stiles splashed into the room, a towel wrapped a bit too loosely around his slim hips and his wet feet dripping footmarks on the floor.

"Just the usual. That you're nuts."

"Derek knows that already."

"But you don't."

"Light me a cigarette, darling," the omega said, snatching off a bathing cap and shaking his hair. "I don't mean you, Lydia." He scooped up the cat and swung him onto his shoulder. The cat perched there with the balance of a bird, his paws tangled in Stiles' hair as if it were knitting yarn; and yet, despite these amiable antics, it was a grim cat with a pirate's cutthroat face; one eye was gluey-blind, the other sparkled with dark deeds. "Lydia is such a gossip," he told Derek, taking the cigarette he'd lighted. "But she does know a terrific lot of phone numbers. What's David O. Selznick's number, Lydia?"

"Lay off."

"It's not a joke, darling. I want you to call him up and tell him what a genius Derek is. He's written barrels of the most marvelous stories. Well, don't blush, Alpha: you didn't say you were a genius, I did. Come on, Lyds. What are you going to do to make Derek rich?"

"Suppose you let me settle that with Derek."

"Remember," he said, leaving them, "I'm his agent. Another thing: if I holler, come zipper me up. And if anybody knocks, let them in."

A multitude did. Within the next quarter-hour, a stag party had taken over the apartment, several of them in uniform. Derek counted two Naval officers and an Air Force colonel, but they were outnumbered by graying arrivals beyond draft status. Except for not being an omega, the guests had no common theme, they seemed strangers among strangers; indeed, each face, on entering, had struggled to conceal dismay at seeing others there. It was as if the host had distributed his invitations while zigzagging through various bars; which was probably the case. After the initial frowns, however, they mixed without grumbling, especially Lydia Martin, who avidly exploited the new company to avoid discussing Derek's Hollywood future. Derek was left abandoned by the bookshelves; of the books there, more than half were about horses or baseball, the rest completely haphazard topics like  _The_   _History of Male_ _Circumcision_. Pretending an interest in  _Horseflesh and How to Tell It_  gave him a sufficiently private opportunity for sizing Stiles' friends.

Presently one of these became prominent. He was a middle-aged child that had never shed its baby fat, though some gifted tailor had almost succeeded in camouflaging his plump bottom. But it was not appearance that singled him out; preserved infants aren't all that rare. It was, rather, his conduct; for he was behaving as though the party were his: like an energetic octopus, he was shaking martinis, making introductions, manipulating the phonograph. In fairness, most of his activities were dictated by the host himself:  _Greenberg, would you mind; Greenberg, would you, please_. If he was in love with Stiles, then clearly he had his jealousy in check. A more jealous alpha might have lost control, watching Stiles as he skimmed around the room, carrying his cat in one hand but leaving the other free to straighten a tie or remove lapel lint; the Air Force colonel wore a medal that came in for quite a polish.

The alpha's name was Rutherfurd ("Rusty") Greenberg. In 1908 he'd lost both his parents, his father the victim of an anarchist and his mother of shock, which double misfortune had made Greenberg an orphan, a millionaire, and a celebrity, all at the age of five. He'd been a standby of the Sunday supplements ever since, a consequence that had gathered hurricane momentum when, still a schoolboy, he had caused his godfather-custodian to be arrested on charges of sodomy. After that, marriage and divorce sustained his place in the tabloid-sun. His first mate had taken herself, and her alimony, to a rival of Father Divine's. The second mate seems unaccounted for, but the third had sued him in New York State with a full satchel of the kind of testimony that entails. He himself divorced the last Mrs. Greenberg, his principal complaint stating that she'd started a mutiny aboard his yacht, said mutiny resulting in his being deposited on the Dry Tortugas. Though he'd been a bachelor since, apparently before the war he'd proposed to Unity Mitford, at least he was supposed to have sent her a cable offering to marry her if Hitler didn't. This was said to be the reason Winchell always referred to him as a Nazi; that, and the fact that he attended rallies in Yorkville.

Derek was not told these things. He read them in  _The Baseball Guide_ , another selection off Stiles' shelf which he seemed to use for a scrapbook. Tucked between the pages were Sunday features, together with scissored snippings from gossip columns.  _Rusty Greenberg and Stiles Stilinski two-on-the-aisle at_  " _One Touch of Venus_ "  _preem_. Stiles came up from behind, and caught Derek reading:  _Omega Stiles Stilinski, making every day a holiday for the 24-karat Rusty Greenberg._

"Admiring my publicity, or are you just a baseball fan?" he said, adjusting his dark glasses as he glanced over the alpha's shoulder.

Derek said, "What was this week's weather report?"

Stiles winked at Derek, but it was humorless: a wink of warning, "I'm all for horses, but I loathe baseball," he said, and the sub-message in his, voice was saying he wished Derek to forget he'd ever mentioned Deucalion. "I hate the sound of it on a radio, but I have to listen, it's part of my research. There're so few things alphas can talk about. If an alpha doesn't like baseball, then he must like horses, and if he doesn't like either of them, well, I'm in trouble anyway: he doesn't like omegas. And how are you making out with Lydia?" 

"We've separated by mutual agreement"

"She's an opportunity, believe me."

"I do believe you. But what have I to offer that would strike her as an opportunity?"

He persisted. "Go over there. She really can help you, Alpha."

"I understand you weren't too appreciative." He seemed puzzled until Derek said: " _The Story of Doctor Wassell._ "

"She's still harping?" he said and cast across the room an affectionate look at Lydia. "But she's got a point, I should feel guilty. Not because they would have given me the part or because I would have been good: they wouldn't and I wouldn't. If I do feel guilty, I guess it's because I let her go on dreaming when I wasn't dreaming a bit. I was just vamping for time to make a few self-improvements: I knew damn well I'd never be a movie star. It's too hard; and if you're intelligent, it's too embarrassing. My complexes aren't inferior enough: being a movie star and having a big fat ego are supposed to go hand-in-hand; actually, it's essential not to have any ego at all. I don't mean I'd mind being rich and famous.That's very much on my schedule, and someday I'll try to get around to it; but if it happens, I'd like to have my ego tagging along. I want to still be me when I wake up one fine morning and have breakfast at Tiffany's. You need a glass," he said, noticing Derek's empty hands. "Greenberg! Will you bring my friend a drink?"

He was still hugging the cat. "Poor slob without a mate. Or even a name. But I haven't any right to give him one: he'll have to wait until he belongs to somebody. We just sort of took up one night, we don't belong to each other: he's an independent, and so am I. I don't want to own anything until I know I've found the place where me and things belong together. I'm not quite sure where that is just yet. But I know what it's like." He smiled, and let the cat drop to the floor. "It's like Tiffany's," he said. "Not that I give a hoot about jewelry. Diamonds, yes. But it's tacky to wear diamonds before you're forty, and even that's risky. They only look right on the really old omegas. Maria Ouspenskaya. Wrinkles and bones, white hair and diamonds: I can't wait. But that's not why I'm mad about Tiffany's. Listen. You know those days when you've got the mean reds?"

"Same as the blues?"

"No," he said slowly. "No, the blues are because you're getting fat or maybe it's been raining too long. You're sad, that's all. But the mean reds are horrible. You're afraid and you sweat like hell, but you don't know what you're afraid of. Except something bad is going to happen, only you don't know what it is. You've had that feeling?"

"Quite often. Some people call it brooding." 

"All right. Brooding. But what do you do about it?"

"Well, a drink helps."

"I've tried that. I've tried aspirin, too. Greenberg thinks I should smoke marijuana, and I did for a while, but it only makes me giggle. What I've found does the most good is just to get into a taxi and go to Tiffany's. It calms me down right away, the quietness and the proud look of it; nothing very bad could happen to you there, not with those kind men in their nice suits, and that lovely smell of silver and alligator wallets. If I could find a real-life place that made me feel like Tiffany's, then I'd buy some furniture and give the cat a name. I've thought maybe after the war, Scott and I—" He pushed up his dark glasses, and his eyes, had taken on a far-seeing sharpness. "I went to Mexico once. It's a wonderful country for raising horses. I saw one place near the sea. Scott's good with horses." 

Rusty Greenberg came carrying a martini; he handed it over without looking at Derek. "I'm hungry," he announced, and his voice, retarded as the rest of him, produced an unnerving brat-whine that seemed to blame Stiles. "It's seven-thirty, and I'm hungry. You know what the doctor said."

"Yes, Greenberg. I know what the doctor said."

"Well, then break it up. Let's go."

"I want you to behave, Rusty." the omega spoke softly, but there was a governess threat of punishment in his tone that caused an odd flush of pleasure, of gratitude, to pink Greenberg's face.

"You don't love me," he complained, as though they were alone.

"Nobody loves naughtiness."

Obviously, the omega had said what he wanted to hear; it appeared to both excite and relax him. Still, he continued, as though it were a ritual: "Do you love me?"

Stiles patted him. "Tend to your chores, Greenberg. And when I'm ready, we'll go eat wherever you want."

"Chinatown?"

"But that doesn't mean sweet and sour spareribs. You know what the doctor said."

As Greenberg returned to his duties with a satisfied waddle, Derek couldn't resist reminding Stiles that he hadn't answered his question. "Do you love him?"

"I told you: you can make yourself love anybody. Besides, he had a stinking childhood."

"If it was so stinking, why does he cling to it?"

"Use your head. Can't you see it's just that Greenberg feels safer in diapers than he would in a skirt? Which is really the choice, only he's awfully touchy about it. He tried to stab me with a butter knife because I told him to grow up and face the issue, settle down and play house with some crazy alpha. Meantime, I've got him on my hands; which is okay, he's harmless, he thinks omegas are dolls, literally."

"Thank God."

"Well, if it were true of most alphas, I'd hardly be thanking God."

"I meant thank God you're not going to marry Mr. Greenberg."

Stiles lifted an eyebrow. "By the way, I'm not pretending I don't know he's rich. Even land in Mexico costs something. Now," the omega said, motioning Derek forward, "let's get hold of Lydia"

Derek held back while his mind worked to win a postponement. Then he remembered: "Why  _Traveling_?"

"On my card?" he said, disconcerted. "You think it's funny?"

"Not funny. Just provocative."

Stiles shrugged. "After all, how do I know where I'll be living tomorrow? So I told them to put  _Traveling_. Anyway, it was a waste of money, ordering those cards. Except I felt I owed it to them to buy some little something. They're from Tiffany's." He reached for Derek's martini, he hadn't touched it; Stiles drained it in two swallows and took the alpha's hand. "Quit stalling. You're going to make friends with Lydia"

An occurrence at the door intervened. It was a young omega, and he entered like a wind-rush, a squall of scarves and jangling gold. "Stilinski," he said, wagging a finger as he advanced, "you miserable hoarder. Hogging all these Alphas!"

He was well over six feet, taller than most alphas there. They straightened their spines, sucked in their stomachs; there was a general contest to match his swaying height.

Stiles said, "What are you doing here?" and his lips were taut as a drawn string. "Nothing. I've been upstairs working with Daehler. Christmas stuff for the Bazaar. But you sound vexed?" He scattered a roundabout smile. "You alphas not vexed at me for butting in on your party?"

Greenberg tittered. He squeezed his arm, as though to admire his muscle, and asked him if he could use a drink.

"I surely could," he said. "Make mine bourbon."

Stiles told him, "There isn't any." Whereupon the Air Force colonel suggested he run out for a bottle.

"Oh, I declare, don't let's have a fuss. I'm happy with ammonia, Stilinski" he said, slightly shoving him, "don't you bother about me. I can introduce myself." He stooped toward Lydia Martin, who, like many short alphas in the presence of tall omegas, had an aspiring mist in her eye. "I'm Jackson Whittemore, from Wildwood, Arkansas. That's hill country."

It seemed a dance, Martin performing some fancy footwork to prevent her rivals cutting in. She lost him to a quadrille of partners who gobbled up his jokes like popcorn tossed to pigeons. It was a comprehensible success. The omega said, "Who can tell me where is the john?"; then, he offered an arm to guide himself.

"That," said Stiles, "won't be necessary. He's been here before. He knows where it is." He was emptying ashtrays, and after Omega Whittemore had left the room, he emptied another, then said, sighed rather: "It's really very sad." He paused long enough to calculate the number of inquiring expressions; it was sufficient. "And so mysterious. You'd think it would show more. But heaven knows, he looks healthy. So, well, clean. That's the extraordinary part. Wouldn't you," he asked with concern, but of no one in particular, "wouldn't you say he looked clean?" Someone coughed, several swallowed. A Naval officer, who had been holding Whittemore's drink, put it down.

"But then," said Stiles, "I hear so many of these Southern omegas have the same trouble." He shuddered delicately and went to the kitchen for more ice. Jackson couldn't understand it, the abrupt absence of warmth on his return; the conversations he began behaved like green logs, they fumed but would not fire. More unforgivably, people were leaving without taking his telephone number. The Air Force colonel decamped while his back was turned, and this was the straw too much: he'd asked the omega to dinner. Suddenly he was blind with rage. And since gin to artifice bears the same relation as tears to mascara, his attractions at once dissembled. He took it out on everyone. He called his host a Hollywood degenerate. He invited an alpha in his fifties to fight. He told Lydia Hitler was right. He exhilarated Greenberg by stiff-arming him into a corner. "You know what's going to happen to you?" he said, with no hint of a stutter. "I'm going to march you over to the zoo and feed you to the yak." The alpha looked altogether willing, but Jackson disappointed him by sliding to the floor, where he sat humming.

"You're a bore. Get up from there," Stiles said, stretching on a pair of gloves. The remnants of the party were waiting at the door, and when the bore didn't budge Stiles cast Derek an apologetic glance. "Be an angel, would you, Derek? Put him in a taxi. He lives at the Winslow."

"Don't. Live at Barbizon. Regent 4-5700. Ask for Jackson Whittemore."

"You are an angel, Derek." 

They were gone. The prospect of steering a drunk omega into a taxi obliterated whatever resentment Derek felt. But Jackson solved the problem himself. Rising on his own steam, he stared down at Derek with a lurching loftiness. He said, "Let's go [Stork](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stork_Club). Catch lucky balloon," and fell full-length like an axed oak. Derek's first thought was to run for a doctor. But examination proved the omega's pulse fine and his breathing regular. He was simply asleep. After finding a pillow for his head, Derek left him to enjoy it.

 


	4. Chapter 4

The following afternoon Derek collided with Stiles on the stairs. "You," the omega said, hurrying past with a package from the druggist. "There he is, on the verge of pneumonia. A hang-over out to here. And the mean reds on top of it." Derek gathered from this that Jackson was still in the apartment, but Stiles gave the alpha no chance to explore his surprising sympathy. Over the weekend, mystery deepened. First, there was the Hawaiian who came to his door: mistakenly, for he was inquiring after Omega Whittemore. It took a while to correct his error.

The second event of the day involved him again. It was toward evening, and Derek saw him on his way out to dinner. He was arriving in a taxi; the driver helped him totter into the house with a load of suitcases.

That gave Derek something to chew on: by Sunday his jaws were quite tired.

Then the picture became both darker and clearer.

 

***

Sunday was an Indian summer day, the sun was strong, Derek's window was open, and he heard voices on the fire escape. Stiles and Jackson were sprawled there on a blanket, the cat between them. Their hair, newly washed, hung lankly. They were busy, Stiles varnishing his toenails, Jackson knitting a sweater. Jackson was speaking.

"If you ask me, I think you're lucky. At least there's one thing you can say for Greenberg. He's an American."

"Bully for him."

"There's a war on."

"And when it's over, you've seen the last of me, boy."

"I don't feel that way. I'm proud of my country. The alphas in my family were great soldiers."

"Scott's a soldier," said Stiles. "They say the more stupid you are the braver. He's pretty slow."

"Scott's that alpha upstairs? I didn't realize he was a soldier. But he does look stupid."

"Yearning. Not stupid. He wants awfully to be on the inside staring out: anybody with their nose pressed against a glass is liable to look stupid. Anyhow, he's a different alpha. Scott's my brother."

"You call your own flesh and blood stupid?"

"If he is he is."

"Well, it's poor taste to say so. An alpha that's fighting for you and me and all of us."

"What is this: a bond rally?"

"I just want you to know where I stand. I appreciate a joke, but underneath I'm a serious person. Proud to be an American. That's why I'm sorry about Danny." He put down his knitting needles. "You do think he's terribly good-looking, don't you?"

Stiles said Hmn, and swiped the cat's whiskers with his brush.

"If only I could get used to the idea of marrying a Hawaiian. And being a Hawaiian myself. It's such a canyon to cross. And not even knowing the language—"

"Go to Berlitz."

"Why on earth would they be teaching Hawaiian? It isn't as though anyone spoke it. No, my only chance is to try and make Danny forget Hawaii and stay here." He sighed and picked up his knitting. "I must be madly in love. You saw us together. Do you think I'm madly in love?"

"Well. Has he tried to bite?"

Jackson dropped a stitch. "Bite?"

"You. In bed."

"Already? No. Should he?" Then he added, censoriously: "But he does laugh."

"Good. That's the right spirit. I like an alpha who sees the humor; most of them, they're all pant and puff. And knot."

Jackson withdrew his complaint; he accepted the comment as flattery reflecting on himself. "Yes. I suppose."

"Okay. He doesn't bite. He laughs. What else?"

Jackson counted up his dropped stitch and began again, knit, purl, purl.

"I said—"

"I heard you. And it isn't that I don't want to tell you. But it's so difficult to remember. I don't dwell on these things. The way you seem to. They go out of my head like a dream. I'm sure that's the normal attitude."

"It may be normal, darling; but I'd rather be natural." Stiles paused in the process of coloring the rest of the cat's whiskers. "Listen. If you can't remember, try leaving the lights on."

"Please understand me, Stiles. I'm a very very very conventional person."

"Oh, balls. What's wrong with a decent look at someone you like? Alphas are beautiful, a lot of them are, Danny is, and if you don't even want to look at him, well, I'd say he's getting a pretty cold plate of macaroni."

"Lower your voice."

"You can't possibly be in love with him. Now. Does that answer your question?"

"No. Because I'm not a cold plate of macaroni. I'm a warm-hearted person. It's the basis of my character."

"Okay. You've got a warm heart. But if I were on my way to bed, I'd rather take along a hot-water bottle. It's more tangible."

"You won't hear any squawks out of Danny," he said complacently, his needles flashing in the sunlight. "What's more, I am in love with him. Do you realize I've knitted ten pairs of Argyles in less than three months? And this is the second sweater." He stretched the sweater and tossed it aside. "What's the point, though? Sweaters in Hawaii. I ought to be making sun helmets."

Stiles lay back and yawned. "It must be winter sometime."

"It rains, that I know. Heat. Rain. Jungles."

"Heat. Jungles. Actually, I'd like that."

"Better you than me."

"Yes," said Stiles, with a sleepiness that was not sleepy. "Better me than you."


	5. Chapter 5

On Monday, when Derek went down for the morning mail, the card on Stiles' box had been altered, a name added: Omega Stilinski and Omega Whittemore were now traveling together. This might have held Derek's interest longer except for a letter in his own mailbox. It was from a small university review to whom he'd sent a story. They liked it; and, though Derek must understand they could not afford to pay, they intended to publish. Publish: that meant print. Dizzy with excitement is no mere phrase. Derek had to tell someone: and, taking the stairs two at a time, pounded on Stiles' door.

 

 

Derek didn't trust his voice to tell the news; as soon as Stiles came to the door, his eyes squinty with sleep, Derek thrust the letter at the omega. It seemed as though he'd had time to read sixty pages before he handed it back. "I wouldn't let them do it, not if they don't pay you," he said, yawning. Perhaps Derek's face explained he'd misconstrued: Stiles' mouth shifted from a yawn into a smile. "Oh, I see. It's wonderful. Well, come in," he said. "Well make a pot of coffee and celebrate. No. I'll get dressed and take you to lunch." 

His bedroom was consistent with his parlor: it perpetuated the same camping-out atmosphere; crates and suitcases, everything packed and ready to go, like the belongings of a criminal who feels the law not far behind. In the parlor, there was no conventional furniture, but the bedroom had the bed itself, a double one at that, and quite flashy: blond wood, tufted satin. 

Stiles left the door of the bathroom open, and conversed from there; between the flushing and the brushing, most of what he said was unintelligible, but the gist of it was: he supposed Derek knew Jackson had moved in and wasn't that convenient? because if you're going to have a roommate, and he isn't a dyke, then the next best thing is a perfect fool, which Jackson was, because then you can dump the lease on them and send them out for the laundry. One could see that Stiles had a laundry problem; the room was strewn with it.

"—and you know, he's quite a successful model: isn't that fantastic! But a good thing," Stiles said, hobbling out of the bathroom as he adjusted a garter. "It ought to keep him out of my hair most of the day. And there shouldn't be too much trouble on the alpha front. He's engaged. Nice guy, too. Where the hell—" Stiles was on his knees poking under the bed. After he'd found what he was looking for, a pair of shoes, he had to search for a belt, and it was a subject to ponder, how, from such wreckage, he evolved the eventual effect: pampered, calmly immaculate, as though he'd been attended by Cleopatra's maids. He said, "Listen," and cupped his hand under Derek's chin, "I'm glad about the story. Really I am. It's great." 

Derek didn't even bother to try hiding the smile caused by the omega's praise.

***

 

That Monday in October 1943. A beautiful day with the buoyancy of a bird. To start, they had Manhattans at Boyd's; and, when he heard of Derek's good luck, champagne cocktails on the house. Later, they wandered toward Fifth Avenue, where there was a parade. The flags in the wind, the thump of military bands and military feet, seemed to have nothing to do with war, but to be, rather, a fanfare arranged in Derek's personal honor. They ate lunch at the cafeteria in the park. Afterward, avoiding the zoo (Stiles said he couldn't bear to see anything in a cage), they laughed along the paths toward the old wooden boathouse. Leaves floated on the lake; on the shore, a park-man was fanning a bonfire of them, and the smoke, rising like Indian signals, was the only smudge on the quivering air. Aprils have never meant much to Derek, autumns seem that season of beginning, spring; which is how he felt sitting with Stiles on the railings of the boathouse porch. He thought of the future and spoke of the past. Because Stiles wanted to know about Derek's childhood. He talked of his own, too; the impression received was contrary to what one expected, for he gave an almost voluptuous account of camping and summer, causing trouble with a friend, Christmas trees and parties: in short, happy in a way that he was not, and never, certainly, the background of a child who had run away. Or, Derek asked, wasn't it true that the omega had been out on his own since he was fourteen? Stiles rubbed his nose. "That's true. The other isn't. But really, Alpha, you made such a tragedy out of your childhood I didn't feel I should compete."

He hopped off the railing. "Anyway, it reminds me: I ought to send Scott some peanut butter." The rest of the afternoon they were east and west worming out of reluctant grocers cans of peanut butter, a wartime scarcity; dark came before they'd rounded up a half-dozen jars, the last at a delicatessen on Third Avenue. It was near the antique shop with the palace of a birdcage in its window, so Derek took the omega there to see it, and he enjoyed the point, its fantasy: "But still, it's a cage."

Passing a Woolworth's, he gripped Derek's arm: "Let's steal something," he said, pulling him into the store, where at once there seemed a pressure of eyes, as though they were already under suspicion. "Come on. Don't be chicken." He scouted a counter piled with paper pumpkins and Halloween masks. The saleslady was occupied with a group of nuns who were trying on masks. Stiles picked up a mask and slipped it over his face; he chose another and put it on Derek; then he took the alpha's hand and they walked away. It was as simple as that. Outside, they ran a few blocks, to make it more dramatic; but also because successful theft exhilarates. Derek wondered if the omega had often stolen. "I used to," he said. "I mean I had to. If I wanted anything. But I still do it every now and then, sort of to keep my hand in."

They wore the masks all the way home.


	6. Chapter 6

Derek spent many hither and yonning days with Stiles; and it's true, they saw a great deal of each other. But toward the end of the month, Derek found a job: it was necessary and lasted from nine to five. Which made Stiles' and his hours, extremely different. Unless it was Thursday, the omega's Sing Sing day, or unless Stiles had gone horseback riding in the park, as he did occasionally, Stiles was hardly up when Derek came home.

Sometimes, yearning Stiles' company, the alpha shared the omega's wake-up coffee while he dressed for the evening. He was forever on his way out, not always with Greenberg, but usually, and usually, too, they were joined by Jackson and the handsome Hawaiian Alpha, whose name was Danny Mahaelani. As a quartet, they struck a unmusical note, primarily the fault of Mahaelani, who seemed as out of place in their company as a violin in a jazz band. He was intelligent, he was presentable, he appeared to have a serious link with his work, which was obscurely governmental, vaguely important, and took him to Washington several days a week. It was a wonder how he could survive night after night with the group.

 

***

It was no novelty to encounter suspicious specimens among Stiles' callers, quite the contrary; but one day early that winter, while passing through the brownstone's vestibule, Derek noticed a man examining the omega's mailbox. An alpha in his early fifties with a hard, weathered face, gray forlorn eyes. He wore an old sweat-stained gray hat, and his cheap suit, a pale blue, hung too loosely on his lanky frame; his shoes were brown and brand new. He seemed to have no intention of ringing Stiles' bell. Slowly, as though he were reading Braille, he kept rubbing a finger across the embossed lettering of the omega's name.

That evening, on Derek's way to supper, he saw the alpha again. He was standing across the street, leaning against a tree and staring up at Stiles' windows. Sinister speculations rushed through Derek's head. Was he a detective? Or some underworld agent connected with Stiles' Sing Sing friend, Deucalion? Derek had become terribly protective of the omega; it was only fair to warn Stiles that he was being watched. As Derek walked to the corner, heading east toward the Hamburg Heaven at Seventy-ninth and Madison, he could feel the other man's attention focused on him. Presently, without turning his head, Derek knew that the other man was following him. Because Derek could hear him whistling. Not any ordinary tune, but the plaintive, prairie melody Stiles sometimes played on his guitar: _Don't wanna sleep, don't wanna die, just wanna go a- travelin' through the pastures of the sky._ The whistling continued across Park Avenue and up Madison. Once, while waiting for a traffic light to change, Derek watched him out of the corner of his eye as he stooped to pet a sleazy Pomeranian. "That's a fine animal you got there," the man told the owner in a hoarse, countrified drawl.

Hamburg Heaven was empty. Nevertheless, he took a seat right beside Derek at the long counter. He smelled of tobacco and sweat. He ordered a cup of coffee, but when it came he didn't touch it. Instead, he chewed on a toothpick and studied Derek in the wall mirror facing them.

"Excuse me," Derek said, speaking to him via the mirror, "but what do you want?"

The question didn't embarrass the man; he seemed relieved to have had it asked. "Son," he said, "I need a friend." 

He brought out a wallet. It was as worn as his leathery hands, almost falling to pieces; and so was the brittle, cracked, blurred snapshot he handed Derek. There were five people in the picture, all grouped together on the sagging porch of a stark wooden house, four of them children and the alpha himself, who had his arm around the waist of a thin young boy with a hand shading his eyes against the sun. "That's me," he said, pointing at himself. "That's him..." he tapped the thin boy. "And this one over here," he added, indicating a boy with a crooked jaw, "that's his brother, Scott." Derek looked at "him" again: and yes, the squinting thin boy was Stiles. At the same moment, Derek realized who the man must be. "You're Stiles' father."

He blinked, he frowned. "His name's not Stiles. He was Genim McCall. Was," he said, shifting the toothpick in his mouth, "till he married me. I'm his husband. Doc Stilinski. I'm a horse doctor, animal man. Do some farming, too. Near Tulip, Texas. Son, why are you laughin'?"  
It wasn't real laughter: it was nerves. Derek took a swallow of water and choked; Stilinski pounded him on the back. "This here's no humorous matter, son. I'm a tired man. I've been five years lookin' for my omega. Soon as I got that letter from Scott, saying where he was, I bought myself a ticket on the Greyhound. Genim belongs home with his alpha and his churren."

"Children?"

"Them's his churren," he said, almost shouted. He meant the two other young faces in the pictures, two bare-footed girls. Well, of course: the man was deranged.

"But Stiles can't be the mother of those children. They're older than he is. Or at least bigger."

"Now, son," he said in a reasoning voice, "I didn't claim they was his natural-born churren. Their own precious mother, precious omega, Jesus rest her soul, she passed away July 4th, Independence Day, 1936. The year of the drought. When I married Genim, that was in March 1939, he was going on fourteen. Maybe an ordinary omega, especially being only fourteen, wouldn't know their right mind. But you take Genim, he was an exceptional omega. He knew good-and-well what he was doing when he promised to be my wife and the mother of my churren. He plain broke our hearts when he ran off like he done."

He sipped his cold coffee and glanced at Derek with a searching earnestness. "Now, son, do you doubt me? Do you believe what I'm saying is so?" Derek did. It was too implausible not to be fact; moreover, it dovetailed with Lydia's description of the Stiles he'd first encountered in California: "You don't know whether he's a hillbilly or an Okie or what."

"Plain broke our hearts when he ran off like he done," the horse doctor repeated. "He had no cause. All the housework was done by his daughters. Genim could just take it easy: fuss in front of mirrors and wash his hair. Our own cows, our own garden, chickens, pigs. 'Twas Nellie, my youngest girl, 'twas Nellie brought 'em into the house. She come to me one morning and said: 'Papa, I got two wild yunguns locked in the kitchen. I caught 'em outside stealing milk and turkey eggs.' That was Genim and Scott. Well, you never saw a more pitiful something. Ribs sticking out everywhere, legs so puny they can't hardly stand. Story was: their mother died of the TB, and their papa done the same. Now Genim and his brother, them two been living with some mean, no-count people a hundred miles east of Tulip. He had good cause to run off from that house. He didn't have none to leave mine. 'Twas his home." He leaned his elbows on the counter and, pressing his closed eyes with his fingertips, sighed. "He plumped out to be a real pretty omega. Lively, too. Talky as a jaybird. With something smart to say on every subject: better than the radio. First thing you know, I'm out picking flowers. I tamed him a bird and taught it to say his name. I showed him how to play the guitar. Just to look at him made the tears spring to my eyes. The night I proposed, I cried like a baby. He said: 'What you want to cry for, Doc? 'Course we'll be mated. I've never been mated before.' Well, I had to laugh, hug and squeeze him: never been mated before!" He chuckled, chewed on his toothpick a moment. "Don't tell me that omega wasn't happy!" he said, challengingly. "We all doted on him. He didn't have to lift a finger, 'cept to eat a piece of pie. 'Cept to comb his hair and send away for all the magazines. We must've had a hunnerd dollars' worth of magazines come into that house. Ask me, that's what done it. Looking at show-off pictures. Reading dreams. That's what started him walking down the road. Every day he'd walk a little further: a mile, and come home. Two miles, and come home. One day he just kept on." He put his hands over his eyes again; his breathing made a ragged noise. "The bird I gave him went wild and flew away. All summer you could hear him. In the yard. In the garden. In the woods. All summer that damned bird was calling: Genim, Genim." He stayed hunched over and silent, as though listening to the long-ago summer sound.

Derek carried their checks to the cashier. While he was paying, the older alpha joined him. They left together and walked over to Park Avenue. It was a cool, blowy evening; swanky awnings flapped in the breeze. The quietness between them continued until Derek said: "But what about his brother? He didn't leave?"

"No," Stilinski said, clearing his throat. "Scott was with us right till they took him in the Army. A fine boy. Fine with horses. He didn't know what got into Genim, how come he left his brother and husband and churren. After he was in the Army, though, Scott started hearing from him. The other day he wrote me Genim's address. So I come to get him. I know he's sorry for what he done. I know he wants to go home."

He seemed to be asking Derek to agree with him. Derek told him that he thought he'd find Stiles, or Genim, somewhat changed.

"Listen, son," Stilinski said, as they reached the steps of the brownstone, "I advised you I need a friend. Because I don't want to surprise him. Scare him none. That's why I've held off. Be my friend: let him know I'm here."

Suddenly the notion of handing Stiles over to his husband horrified Derek and, glancing up at the windows, he hoped the omega wasn't home.

But Stilinski's proud earnest eyes and sweat-stained hat made him ashamed of such feelings. Derek had no right to the omega. The older alpha followed Derek into the house and prepared to wait at the bottom of the stairs. "Do I look nice?" he whispered, brushing his sleeves, tightening the knot of his tie.

Stiles was home. He answered the door at once; in fact, he was on his way out—the quantities of perfume announced gala intentions. "Well, Alpha," he said, and playfully slapped Derek's arm. "I'm in too much of a hurry to entertain you. We'll smoke the pipe tomorrow, okay?"

"Sure, Genim. If you're still around tomorrow."

He took off his dark glasses and squinted at Derek. "He told you that," he said in a small, shivering voice. "Oh, please. Where is he?" He ran past Derek into the hall. "Scott!" he called down the stairs. "Scott! Where are you?"

Derek could hear Stilinski's footsteps climbing the stairs. His head appeared above the banisters, and Stiles backed away from him, not as though he were frightened, but as though he were retreating into a shell of disappointment. Then the alpha was standing in front of him. "Gosh, Genim," he began, and hesitated, for Genim was gazing at him vacantly, as though he couldn't place him. "little omega," he said, "don't they feed you up here? You're so skinny. Like when I first saw you. All wild around the eye."


	7. Chapter 7

"Divorce him? Of course I never broke any bond. I was only fourteen, for God's sake. It couldn't even have been possible to form one. Or legal." Stiles tapped an empty martini glass. "Two more, Alpha Boyd."  
Boyd, in whose bar they were sitting, accepted the order reluctantly. "You're rockin' the boat kinda early," he complained, crunching on a Tums. It was not yet noon, according to the black mahogany clock behind the bar, and he'd already served them three rounds.  
"But it's Sunday, Alpha. Clocks are slow on Sundays." the omega told him.

Boyd disdainfully settled the fresh martinis in front of them.

"Never love a wild thing, Alpha Boyd," Stiles advised him. "That was Doc's mistake. He was always lugging home wild things. A hawk with a hurt wing. One time it was a wildcat with a broken leg. But you can't give your heart to a wild thing: the more you do, the stronger they get. Until they're strong enough to run into the woods. Or fly into a tree. Then a taller tree. Then the sky. That's how you'll end up, Alpha Boyd. If you let yourself love a wild thing. You'll end up looking at the sky."

"He's drunk," Boyd informed Derek.

"Moderately," Stiles confessed. "I must look fierce. But who wouldn't? We spent the night roaming around in a bus station. Right up till the last minute Doc thought I was going to go with him. Even though I kept telling him: 'But, Alpha, I'm not fourteen anymore, and I'm not Genim.'"

Then he confided to Derek "But the terrible part is, and I realized it while we were standing there, I am. I'm still stealing turkey eggs and running through a brier patch. Only now I call it having the mean reds."  
The omega blushed and glanced away guiltily. For the first time since Derek had known him, he seemed to feel a need to justify himself: "But Doc knew what I meant. I explained it to him very carefully, and it was something he could understand. We shook hands and he wished me luck. I've always remembered Doc in my prayers. Please stop smirking!" he demanded, stabbing out a cigarette. "I do say my prayers."

"I'm not smirking. I'm smiling. You're the most amazing person." Derek told him. And really meant it.

"I suppose I am," Stiles said and grinned at Derek, and his face, wan, rather bruised-looking in the morning light, brightened and blushed at the alpha's praise; he smoothed his tousled hair, and the color of it glimmered like a shampoo advertisement.

He glanced at the clock. "He must be in the Blue Mountains by now."

"What's he talkin' about?" Boyd asked Derek.

Stiles lifted his martini. "Let's wish Doc luck," he said, touching his glass against Derek's. "Good luck: and believe me, dearest Doc—it's better to look at the sky than live there. Such an empty place; so vague. Just a country where the thunder goes and things disappear."

 

***

Late one afternoon, while waiting for a Fifth Avenue bus, Derek noticed a taxi stop across the street to let out an omega who ran up the steps of the Forty-second Street public library. He was through the doors before Derek recognized him.

The alpha let curiosity guide him between the lions, debating on the way whether he should admit following Stiles or pretend coincidence. In the end, he did neither but concealed himself some tables away from Stiles in the general reading room, where he sat behind his dark glasses and a fortress of literature he'd gathered at the desk. He sped from one book to the next, intermittently lingering on a page, always with a frown, as if it were printed upside down. He had a pencil poised above paper — nothing seemed to catch his fancy, still now and then, as though, for the hell of it, he made laborious scribblings.

It was after seven when the omega started to perk up his appearance from what he deemed correct for a library to what he considered suitable for [the Colony](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Colony_\(restaurant\)). When he'd left, Derek wandered over to the table where Stiles' books remained; they were what he had wanted to see. _Ohana. Heat of Hawaii. The Political Mind of Polynesia._ And so forth.

 

***

 ** _GREENBERG MARRIES FOURTH._** Derek was on a subway somewhere in Brooklyn when he saw that headline. The paper that bannered it belonged to another passenger. The only part of the text that he could see read: _Rutherfurd "Rusty" Greenberg, the millionaire playboy often accused of pro-Nazi sympathies, eloped to Greenwich yesterday with a beautiful_ —. Not that Derek wanted to read any more. Stiles had married him: well, well. Derek wished he were under the wheels of the train. The alpha hadn't seen Stiles, not really, since their drunken Sunday at Boyd's bar. The intervening weeks had given Derek his own case of the mean reds. The headline made the desire quite positive. If Stiles could marry that "absurd fetus," then the army of wrongness rampant in the world might as well march over Derek. Or, and the question is apparent, was Derek's outrage the result of being in love with Stiles himself? A little. For he was completely in love with him. Derek had started to cling to the omega more and more, constantly longing for his company. A few words, a smile from the younger man, and the alpha was satisfied for a while. And now this love had started to generate burning jealousy in him.

When Derek reached his station he bought a paper; and, reading the tail-end of that sentence, discovered that Rusty's bride was: _a beautiful cover omega from the Arkansas hills, Omega Jackson Colton Whittemore._ Jackson! Derek's legs went so limp with relief he took a taxi the rest of the way home.

 


	8. Chapter 8

On Christmas Eve Stiles and Jackson gave a party. Stiles asked Derek to come early and help trim the tree. Derek's still not sure how they maneuvered that tree into the apartment. The top branches were crushed against the ceiling, the lower ones spread wall-to-wall; altogether it was not unlike the yuletide giant we see in Rockefeller Plaza. Moreover, it would have taken a Rockefeller to decorate it, for it soaked up baubles and tinsel-like melting snow. Stiles ran out to Woolworth's and stole some balloons and they turned the tree into a fairly good show. They made a toast to their work, and Stiles said: "Look in the bedroom. There's a present for you." Derek had one for the omega, too: a small package in his pocket that felt even smaller when he saw, square on the bed and wrapped with a red ribbon, the beautiful birdcage.

"But, Stiles! It's dreadful!"

"I couldn't agree more, but I thought you wanted it."

"The money! Three hundred and fifty dollars!"

He shrugged. "A few extra trips to the powder room. Promise me, though. Promise you'll never put a living thing in it."

The urge to pull the omega into his arms and kiss him was growing beyond control, but before Derek could act Stiles held out his hand "Gimme," he said, smirking and tapping the bulge in the alpha's pocket.

"I'm afraid it isn't much," and it wasn't: a St. Christopher's medal. But at least it came from Tiffany's.

"To keep me safe while traveling?" he wondered and smiled a small gentle smile at Derek "It's perfect."

 

And then suddenly it was.

 

***

Sometime in February, Stiles had gone on a winter trip with Greenberg, Jackson and Danny. 

He'd had a wonderful time: "Well, first of all, we were in Key West, and Greenberg got mad at some sailors, or vice versa, anyway he'll have to wear a spine brace the rest of his life. Jackson ended up in the hospital, too. First-degree sunburn. Disgusting: all blisters and citronella. He looked like some reptile. We couldn't stand the smell of him. So Danny and I left them in the hospital and went to Havana. He says wait till I see Honolulu; but as far as I'm concerned Havana can take my money right now. Of course, when we got back to Key West, Jackson was positive I'd spent the whole time sleeping with Danny. So was Greenberg: he wanted to hear the details. Actually, things were pretty tense until I had a heart-to-heart with Jackson."

They were in the front room, where, though it was now nearly March, the enormous Christmas tree, turned brown and scentless, its balloons shriveled as an old cow's dugs, still occupied most of the space. A recognizable piece of furniture had been added to the room: an army cot; Stiles was sprawled on it under a sun lamp.

"And you convinced him?"

"That I hadn't slept with Danny? God, yes. I simply told—but you know: made it sound like an agonized confession—simply told him I was gay."

"He couldn't have believed that."

"The hell he didn't. Why do you think he went out and bought this army cot? Leave it to me: I'm always top banana in the shock department. Be a darling, alpha, rub some oil on my back." While Derek was performing this service, he said: "Lydia's in town, and listen, I gave her your story in the magazine. She was quite impressed. She thinks maybe you're worth helping. But she says you're on the wrong track. Mates and pups; who cares?"

"Not Lydia, I gather."

"Well, I agree with her. It doesn't mean anything."

Derek's hand, smoothing oil on the omega's skin, seemed to have a mind of its own: it yearned to come down on his buttocks. "Give me an example," the alpha said quietly. "Of something that means something. In your opinion."

"Freedom. And money," he said, without hesitation. 

"But that's unreasonable. You're talking about-"

The omegas muscles hardened, the touch of him was like stone warmed by the sun. "Everybody wants to have somebody," he said. "But it's customary to present a little proof before you take the privilege. Don't you want to make money? Just to ensure you can even have a future?"

"I haven't planned that far."

"That's how your stories sound. As though you'd written them without knowing the end. Well, I'll tell you: you'd better make money. You have an expensive imagination. Not many people are going to buy you bird cages."

"Sorry."

"You will be if you claim me. You've wanted to for a while, I've noticed, and you want to right now."

Derek did, terribly; his hand, his heart was shaking as he recapped the bottle of oil. "Oh no, I wouldn't regret that. I'm only sorry you wasted your money on me: powder room trips are too hard of a way earning your freedom."

Stiles sat up on the army cot, his face, his bare chest coldly blue in the sun-lamp light. "It should take you about four seconds to walk from here to the door. I'll give you two."

 


	9. Chapter 9

Derek went straight upstairs, got the birdcage, took it down and left it in front of the omega's door. That settled that. Or so Derek imagined until the next morning when, as he was leaving for work, he saw the cage perched on a sidewalk ash-can waiting for the garbage collector. Rather sheepishly, the alpha rescued it and carried it back to his room, a capitulation that did not lessen his resolve to put Omega Stilinski out of his life. It was better that way; for the both of them. Stiles was someone never to be spoken to again.

And Derek didn't. Not for a long while. They passed each other on the stairs with lowered eyes. If Stiles walked into Boyd's, Derek forced himself to walk out. At one point, Omega Harris, who lived on the first floor, circulated a petition among the brownstone's other tenants asking them to join him in having Omega Stilinski evicted: he was, said Omega Harris, "morally objectionable" and the "perpetrator of all-night gatherings that endangered the safety and sanity of his neighbors." Derek couldn't make himself sign. Harris' petition failed, and as April approached May, the open-windowed, warm spring nights were lurid with the party sounds, the loud-playing phonograph and martini laughter that emanated from Apt. 2.

 

***

Omega Adrian Harris met Derek in the hall, wild-eyed and wringing his hands. "Run," he said. "Bring the police. He's killing somebody! Somebody is killing him!" It sounded like it. As though tigers were loose in Stiles' apartment. A riot of crashing glass, of rippings and callings and overturned furniture. But there were no quarreling voices inside the uproar, which made it seem unnatural. "Run," shrieked Omega Harris, pushing Derek. "Tell the police murder!"

Derek ran; but only upstairs to Stiles' door. Pounding on it had one result: the racket subsided. Stopped altogether. But pleading to let the alpha in went unanswered, and Derek's efforts to break down the door merely culminated in a bruised shoulder. Then below he heard Omega Harris commanding some newcomer to go for the police. "Shut up," he was told, "and get out of my way." It was Danny Mahaelani. Looking sweaty and frightened he ordered Derek out of his way, too. And, using his own key, opened the door. "In here, Dr. Goldman," he said, beckoning to a man accompanying him. Since no one prevented him, Derek followed them into the apartment, which was tremendously wrecked. At last, the Christmas tree had been dismantled, very literally: its brown dry branches sprawled in a welter of torn-up books, broken lamps and phonograph records. Even the icebox had been emptied, its contents tossed around the room: raw eggs were sliding down the walls and in the midst of the debris Stiles' no-name cat was calmly licking a puddle of milk. In the bedroom, the smell of smashed perfume bottles made Derek gag.

Derek stepped on Stiles' dark glasses; they were lying on the floor, the lenses already shattered, the frames cracked in half. Perhaps that is why Stiles, a rigid figure on the bed, stared at Derek so blindly, seemed not to see the doctor, who, testing his pulse, crooned: "You're a tired little omega. Very tired. You want to go to sleep, don't you? Sleep." Stiles rubbed his forehead, leaving a smear of blood from a cut finger. "Sleep," he said and whimpered like an exhausted, fretful child. "He's the only one would ever let me. Let me hug him on cold nights. I saw a place in Mexico. With horses. By the sea."

"With horses by the sea," lullabied the doctor, selecting from his black case a hypodermic. "Didn't hurt a bit, now did it?" he inquired, smugly dabbing Stiles' arm with a scrap of cotton. The omega came to sufficiently to focus the doctor. "Everything hurts. Where are my glasses?" But he didn't need them. His eyes were closing of their own accord.  
"Please, sirs," the doctor was quite short with them, "if you will leave me alone with the patient."

Danny withdrew to the front room, where he released his temper on the snooping, tiptoeing presence of Omega Harris. "Don't touch me! I'll call the police," he threatened and considered throwing Derek out, too, but invited him to have a drink instead. The only unbroken bottle they could find contained dry vermouth. "I have a worry," he confided. "I have a worry that this will cause a scandal. And my work is too delicate for that." He seemed cheered to learn that Derek saw no reason for a "scandal"; demolishing one's own possessions was, presumably, a private affair. "It is only a question of grieving," he firmly declared. "When the sadness came, first he threw the drink he was drinking. The bottle. Those books. A lamp. Then I got scared and went to find a doctor."

"But why?" Derek wanted to know. "What would he have a fit over?"

Danny's eyes searched the litter on the floor; he picked up a ball of yellow paper. "This," he said. It was a telegram from Tulip, Texas: _Received notice young Scott killed in action overseas stop your husband and children join in the sorrow of our mutual loss stop letter follows love Doc_.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> :(


	10. Chapter 10

Stiles never talked about Scott anymore. June, July, all through the warm months he hibernated like a winter animal who did not know spring had come and gone. He became rather careless about his clothes: used to rush round to the delicatessen wearing a rain slicker and nothing underneath.

Jackson finally moved to live with Greenberg, his name abandoning Stiles' mailbox. The omega spent a lot of time alone. He entertained no one and seldom left the apartment — except on Thursdays when he made his weekly trip to Ossining. Which is not to imply that he had lost interest in life; far from it, he seemed more content, altogether happier than Derek had ever seen him. A keen sudden un-Stiles-like enthusiasm for homemaking resulted in several un-Stiles-like purchases: at a ParkeBernet auction he acquired a stag-at-bay hunting tapestry and, from the William Randolph Hearst estate, a gloomy pair of Gothic "easy" chairs; he bought the complete Modern Library, shelves of classical records, innumerable. Metropolitan Museum reproductions (including a statue of a Chinese cat that his own cat hated and hissed at and ultimately broke), a Waring mixer and a pressure cooker and a library of cookbooks. He spent whole hausfrau afternoons slopping about in the sweatbox of his midget kitchen: "Who would have dreamed I had such a great natural talent?" he joked when he served Derek burned eggs. Simple dishes, steak, a proper salad, were beyond him. Instead, he fed Derek, and occasionally Danny, outré soups (brandied black terrapin poured into avocado shells) Nero-ish novelties (roasted pheasant stuffed with pomegranates and persimmons) and other dubious innovations (chicken and saffron rice served with a chocolate sauce: "An East Indian classic, my dear.") Wartime sugar and cream rationing restricted his imagination when it came to sweets — nevertheless, he once managed something called Tobacco Tapioca: best not describe it.

Nor describe his attempts to master Spanish, a tedious ordeal for both, for whenever Derek visited him an album of Linguaphone records never ceased rotating on the phonograph. Though Derek's feelings for the omega weren't mentioned again Stiles rarely spoke a sentence that did not begin, "After I find a rich Alpha" or "When I move to Mexico—" that made the alpha's heart ache.

"I wish, please don't laugh—but I wish I could be a virgin for my mate. Not that I've warmed the multitudes some people say: I don't blame the bastards for saying it, I've always thrown out such a jazzy line. Really, though, I toted up the other night, and I've only had eleven lovers—not counting anything that happened before I was thirteen because, after all, that just doesn't count. Theo Raeken and all those other rodents I sort of hypnotized myself into thinking their sheer rattiness had a certain allure. Eleven. Does that make me a whore? Look Honey Tucker. Or Rose Ellen Ward. They've had the old clap-yo'-hands so many times it amounts to applause. But do decent alphas only want you if you're good? Not law-type good—I'd rob a grave, I'd steal two-bits off a dead man's eyes if I thought it would contribute to the day's enjoyment—but the obedient omega-type good. I'd rather die than go through heat alone. Oh, screw it—hand me my guitar, and I'll sing you in the most perfect Spanish."

 

Those final weeks, spanning end of summer and the beginning of another autumn, are blurred in memory, perhaps because their understanding of each other had reached that sweet depth where two people communicate more often in silence than in words: an affectionate quietness replaces the tensions, the unrelaxed chatter and chasing about that produce a friendship's more showy, more, in the surface sense, dramatic moments. Frequently, when Stiles was out of town (Derek had developed hostile attitudes toward his absence) they spent entire evenings together during which they exchanged less than a hundred words; once, they walked all the way to Chinatown, ate a chow-mein supper, bought some paper lanterns and stole a box of joss sticks, then moseyed across the Brooklyn Bridge, and on the bridge, as they watched seaward moving ships pass between the cliffs of burning skyline, the omega said: "Years from now, years and years, one of those ships will bring me back, me and my nine pups. Because yes, they must see this, these lights, the river—I love New York, even though it isn't mine, the way something has to be, a tree or a street or a house, something, anyway, that belongs to me because I belong to it." And the alpha said: "Do shut up," for he felt infuriatingly left out—a tugboat in drydock while Stiles, glittery voyager of secure destination, steamed down the harbor with whistles whistling and confetti in the air. So the days, the last days, blow about in memory, hazy, autumnal, all alike as leaves: until a day unlike any other Derek has lived.


	11. Chapter 11

It happened to fall on the 30th of September, Derek's birthday, a fact which had no effect on events, except that, expecting some form of monetary remembrance from his remaining family, he was eager for the postman's morning visit. Indeed, he went downstairs and waited for him. If he had not been loitering in the vestibule, then Stiles would not have asked him to go horseback riding; and would not, consequently, have had the opportunity to save Derek's life. "Come on," he said when he found the alpha awaiting the postman. "Let's walk a couple of horses around the park." He was wearing a windbreaker and a pair of blue jeans and tennis shoes. "There's a horse, my darling old Roscoe—I can't go without saying goodbye to Roscoe."

 

"Goodbye?"

"I've got my rich alpha: Danny! We're going to Hawaii. To get bonded. A week from Saturday." The surprise of these news hit Derek hard. In rather a trance, he let the omega lead him down to the street. "We change planes in Los Angeles. Then over the sea. Taxi!" Over the sea. As they rode in a cab across Central Park it seemed to Derek as though he, too, were flying, desolately floating over perilous territory. "But you can't," he plead "After all, what about. Well, what about. Well, you can't really run off and leave m—everybody."

"I don't think anyone will miss me. I have no friends."

"I will. Miss you. So will Boyd. And oh—millions. Like Deucalion."

"Poor old man," Stiles said and sighed. "You know I haven't been to see him in a month? When I told him I was going away, he was an angel. Actually"—he frowned—"he seemed delighted that I was leaving. He said it was all for the best. Because sooner or later there might be trouble. If they found out I wasn't his real nephew. That lawyer, Ennis, sent me five hundred dollars. In cash. A present from Deucalion."

Derek wanted to be unkind. "Does Danny know you're married already?"

"What's the matter with you? Are you trying to ruin the day? It's a beautiful day: leave it alone!"

"But it's perfectly possible—" 

"It isn't possible. I've told you, that wasn't legal. It couldn't be." He rubbed his nose and glanced at the alpha sideways. "Mention that to a living soul, darling. I'll hang you by your toes and dress you for a hog." The stables were on West Sixty-sixth street. Stiles selected an old sway-back black and white mare for Derek: "Don't worry, she's safer than a cradle." Which, in the alpha's case, was a necessary guarantee, for ten-cent pony rides at childhood carnivals were the limit of his equestrian experience. Stiles mounted his own horse, a silvery animal that took the lead as they jogged across the traffic of Central Park West and entered a riding path dappled with leaves denuding breezes danced about. "See?" he shouted. "It's great!" And suddenly it was. Suddenly, watching the colors of Stiles' hair flash in the red-yellow leaf light, Derek loved him enough to forget himself, his self-pitying despairs, and be content that something the omega thought happy was going to happen. Very gently the horses began to trot, waves of wind splashed them, spanked their faces, they plunged in and out of sun and shadow pools, and joy, a glad-to-be-alive exhilaration, jolted through Derek like a jigger of nitrogen. That was one minute; the next introduced farce in grim disguise.

 

*** 

 

For all at once, like savage members of a jungle ambush, a band of boys leaped out of the shrubbery along the path. Hooting, cursing, they launched rocks and thrashed at the horse's rumps with switches. The black and white mare, rose on her hind legs, whinnied, teetered like a tightrope artist, then blue-streaked down the path, bouncing Derek's feet out of the stirrups and leaving him scarcely attached. Her hooves made the gravel stones spit sparks. The sky careened. Trees, a lake with little-boy sailboats, statues went by licketysplit. Nursemaids rushed to rescue their charges from our awesome approach; men, bums and others, yelled: "Pull in the reins!" and "Whoa, boy, whoa!" and "Jump!" It was only later that Derek remembered these voices; at the time he was simply conscious of Stiles, the cowboy-sound of him racing behind, never quite catching up, and over and over calling encouragements. Onward: across the park and out into Fifth Avenue: stampeding against the noonday traffic, taxis, buses that screechingly swerved. Past the Duke mansion, the Frick Museum, past the Pierre and the Plaza. But Stiles gained ground; moreover, a mounted policeman had joined the chase: flanking Derek's runaway mare, one on either side, their horses performed a pincer movement that brought her to a steamy halt. It was then, at last, that Derek fell off her back. Fell off and picked himself up and stood there, not altogether certain where he was. A crowd gathered. The policeman huffed and wrote in a book: presently he was most sympathetic, grinned and said he would arrange for the horses to be returned to their stable. Stiles put them in a taxi. "Alpha. How do you feel?"

"Fine."

"But you haven't any pulse," he said, feeling Derek's wrist.

"Then I must be dead."

"No, idiot. This is serious. Look at me." The trouble was, Derek couldn't see him; rather, he saw several of the same omega, a trio of sweaty faces so white with concern that Derek was both touched and embarrassed. "Honestly. I don't feel anything. Except ashamed."

"Please. Are you sure? Tell me the truth. You might have been killed."

"But I wasn't. And thank you. For saving my life. You're wonderful. Unique. I love you."

"Damn fool." Stiles kissed him. Then there were four of him, and Derek fainted dead away.


	12. Chapter 12

That evening, photographs of Stiles were front-paged by the late edition of the Journal-American and by the early editions of both the Daily News and the Daily Mirror. The publicity had nothing to do with runaway horses. It concerned quite another matter, as the headlines revealed: _OMEGA ARRESTED IN NARCOTICS SCANDAL_ (Journal-American), _ARREST DOPE-SMUGGLING ACTOR_ (Daily News), _DRUG RING EXPOSED, GLAMOUR OMEGA HELD_ (Daily Mirror). Of the lot, the News printed the most striking picture: Stiles, entering police headquarters, wedged between two muscular detectives, both alphas; one male, one female. In this squalid context, even his clothes (he was still wearing his riding costume, windbreaker and blue jeans) suggested a gang-moll hooligan: an impression dark glasses, disarrayed coiffure and a Picayune cigarette dangling from sullen lips did not diminish. The caption read:  _Twenty-year-old Omega Stiles Stilinski, beautiful movie star and cafe society celebrity D.A. alleges to be key figure in international drug-smuggling racket linked to racketeer Deucalion. Dets. Patrick Connor and Sheilah Fezzonetti (L. and R.) are shown escorting him into 67th St. Precinct. See story on Pg. 3._ The story _,_ featuring a photograph of a man identified as Ennis (shielding his face with a fedora), ran three full columns.

 

Here, somewhat condensed, are the pertinent paragraphs:  _Members of café society were stunned today by the arrest of gorgeous Omega Stilinski, twenty-year-old Hollywood star and highly publicized omega. At the same time, 2 P.M., police nabbed Ennis, 35, of the Hotel Seabord, W. 49th St., as he exited from a Hamburg Heaven on Madison Ave. Both are alleged by District Attorney Frank L. Donovan to be important figures in an international drug ring dominated by the notorious Mafia-führer Deucalion, currently in Sing Sing serving a five-year rap for political bribery ... Ennis, has a history of arrests dating back to 1934 when he served two years for operating a phony Rhode Island mental institution, Eichen House. Omega Stilinski, who has no previous criminal record, was arrested in his luxurious apartment at a swank East Side address ... Although the D.A.'s office has issued no formal statement, responsible sources insist the beautiful omega, not long ago the constant companion of multimillionaire Rutherfurd Greenberg has been acting as "liaison" between the imprisoned Deucalion and his chief lieutenant, Ennis ... Posing as a relative of Deucalion, Omega Stilinski is said to have paid weekly visits to Sing Sing, and on these occasions Deucalion supplied him with verbally coded messages which he then transmitted to Ennis. Via this link, Deucalion, was able to keep firsthand control of a worldwide narcotics syndicate with outposts in Mexico, Cuba, Sicily, Tangier, Tehran and Dakar. But the D.A.'s office refused to offer any detail on these allegations or even verify them ... Tipped off, a large number of reporters were on hand at the E. 67th St. Precinct station when the accused pair arrived for booking. Ennis refused to comment and kicked one cameraman in the groin. But Omega Stilinski, a fragile eyeful, even though attired in slacks and leather jacket, appeared relatively unconcerned. "Don't ask me what the hell this is about," he told reporters. "Parce-que Je ne sais pas, mes chères. (Because I do not know, my dears). Yes—I have visited Deucalion. I used to go to see him every week. What's wrong with that?"_

There is one especially gross error in this report: Stiles was not arrested in his "luxurious apartment." It took place in Derek's bathroom. The alpha was soaking away his horseride pains in a tub of scalding water laced with Epsom salts; Stiles, an attentive nurse, was sitting on the edge of the tub waiting to rub the alpha with Sloan's liniment and tuck him into bed. There was a knock at the front door. As the door was unlocked, Stiles called Come in. In came Omega Harris, trailed by a pair of civilian-clothed detectives, one of them a lady with thick yellow braids roped around her head. "Here he is: the wanted omega!" boomed Omega Harris, invading the bathroom and leveling a finger, first at Stiles', then Derek's nakedness. "Look. What a whore he is."

The male detective seemed embarrassed: by Omega Harris and by the situation; but a harsh enjoyment tensed the face of his companion—she plumped a hand on Stiles' shoulder and, in a surprising baby-child voice, said: "Come along, Omega. You're going places." Whereupon Stiles coolly told her: "Get your hands off of me, you dreary, driveling old bitch."

Which rather angered the lady: she slapped Stiles damned hard. So hard, his head twisted on his neck, and the bottle of linement, flung from his hand, smithereened on the tile floor—where Derek, scampering out of the tub, enraged due to the omega being hurt, stepped on it and all but severed both big toes. Nude and bleeding a path of bloody footprints, he followed the action as far as the hall. "Don't forget," Stiles managed to instruct him as the detectives propelled him down the stairs, "please feed the cat."

 

***

Of course Derek believed Omega Harris to blame: he'd several times called the authorities to complain about Stiles. It didn't occur to him the affair could have dire dimensions until that evening when Boyd showed up flourishing the newspapers. He was too agitated to speak sensibly; he caroused the room hitting his fists together while Derek read the accounts. Then he said: "You think it's so? He was mixed up in this lousy business?"

"Well, yes."

Boyd popped a Tums in his mouth and, glaring at Derek, chewed it as though he were crunching bones. "Boy, that's rotten. And you say you're in love with him."

"Just a minute. I didn't say he was involved knowingly. He wasn't. But there, he did do it. Carry messages and whatnot—"

He said: "Take it pretty calm, don't you? Jesus, he could get ten years. More." He yanked the papers away from Derek. "You know his friends. These rich fellows. Come down to the bar, we'll start phoning. Stiles is going to need fancier shysters than what we can afford."

Derek was too sore and shaky to dress himself; Boyd had to help. Back at his bar, he propped him in the telephone booth with a triple martini and a brandy tumbler full of coins. But Derek couldn't think who to contact. Danny was in Washington, and Derek had no notion where to reach him there. Didn't really want to either. Greenberg? Not that bastard! Only: what other friends of Stiles' did Derek know? Perhaps the omega had been right when he'd said he had none, not really. Derek put through a call to Crestview 5-6958 in Beverly Hills, the number long-distance information gave him for Lydia. The person who answered said Alpha Martin was having a massage and couldn't be disturbed: sorry, try later. Boyd was incensed—told Derek he should have said it was a life and death matter; and he insisted on trying Greenberg. First, Derek spoke to Greenberg's butler—Alpha and Omega Greenberg, he announced, were at dinner and might he take a message? Boyd shouted into the receiver: "This is urgent, mister. Life and death." The outcome was that Derek found himself talking—listening, rather—to the former Jackson Whittemore: "Are you stalkers?" he demanded. "My mate and I will positively sue anyone who attempts to connect our names with that revolting and degenerate omega. I always knew he was a hop-hop-head with no more morals than a bitch in heat. Prison is where he belongs. And my mate agrees one thousand percent. We will positively sue anyone who—" Hanging up, Derek remembered the old alpha down in Tulip, Texas; but no, Stiles wouldn't like it if Derek called him. Derek rang California again; the circuits were busy, stayed busy, and by the time Lydia was on the line Derek had emptied so many martinis she had to tell Derek why he was phoning her:

"About Stiles, is it? I know already. I spoke to Iggy Fitelstein already. He's the best in New York. I told him to take care of it, send me the bill and keep my name anonymous. Well, I owe Stiles that much. Not that I owe him anything, you want to come down to it. He's crazy. A phony. But a real phony, you know? Anyway, they only got him in ten thousand bail. Don't worry, Iggy will spring him tonight—it wouldn't surprise me if he's home already."

 


	13. Chapter 13

But Stiles hadn't returned the next morning when Derek went down to feed the cat. Having no key to the apartment, Derek used the fire escape and gained entrance through a window. The cat was in the bedroom, and not alone: a man was there, crouching over a suitcase. Derek and the man, each thinking the other a burglar, exchanged uncomfortable stares as Derek stepped through the window. The man had a pretty face, lacquered hair, he resembled Danny. And Derek said, certain it was so: "Did Alpha Mahaelani send you?" 

 

"I'm his cousin," the man said with a wary grin and just-penetrable accent and, seeming to dismiss Derek, resumed his valet activities. So: the alpha was planning a powder.

Well, Derek wasn't amazed; or in the slightest sorry. Still, what a heartbreaking stunt: "He ought to be horse-whipped." The cousin just giggled. He shut the suitcase and produced a letter. "My cousin, he asked me to leave this behind." On the envelope was scribbled: For Omega Stilinski. Derek sat down on Stiles' bed, and hugged the omega's cat, and felt horrible for being so happy over Danny's betrayal.

For a moment Derek wondered if he shouldn't give Stiles the letter at all but he couldn't destroy the letter; or keep it in his pocket when Stiles very tentatively inquired if, if by any chance, the alpha had any news of Danny. It was two mornings later; Derek was sitting by the omega's bedside in a room that reeked of iodine and bedpans, a hospital room. Stiles had been there since the night of his arrest.

"Well, darling," he'd greeted the alpha, as he tiptoed toward the omega while carrying a carton of Picayune cigarettes and a wheel of new-autumn violets, "I got beat up." He looked not quite twelve years: his dark hair brushed back, his eyes, for once minus their dark glasses, clear as rainwater—one couldn't believe how hurt he'd been. Yet it was true: "Christ, I nearly cooled."

Except for the lawyer Lydia had hired, Derek was the only visitor the omega had been allowed. His room was shared by other patients, a trio of triplet-like omegas who, examining the alpha with an interest not unkind but total, speculated in whispered Italian. Stiles explained that: "They think you're my mate. The fellow what done me wrong"; and, to a reluctant suggestion that he set them straight, replied: "I can't. They don't speak English. Anyway, I wouldn't dream of spoiling their fun." It was then that he asked about Danny. The instant he saw the letter he squinted his eyes and bent his lips in a tough tiny smile that advanced his age immeasurably. "An omega doesn't read this sort of thing without Picayune." he said and took a puff: "Tastes bum. But divine," he said and, tossing Derek the letter: "Maybe this will come in handy—if you ever write a rat-romance. Don't be hoggy: read it aloud. I'd like to hear it myself."

It began: "My dearest little omega—" Stiles at once interrupted. He wanted to know what Derek thought of the handwriting. Derek thought nothing: a tight, highly legible, uneccentric script. "It's him to a T." the omega declared. "Go on." "My dearest little omega, upon discovering in such a brutal and public style how very different you are from the manner of omega an alpha of my faith and career could hope to associate himself with. I grief for the disgrace of your present circumstance and do not find it in my heart to add my condemn to the condemn that surrounds you. So I hope you will find it in your heart not to condemn me. I have my family to protect, and my name, and I am a coward where those institutions enter. Forget me, beautiful. May God always be with you. —Danny."

"Well?"

"In a way it seems quite honest. And even touching."

"Touching? That square-ball jazz!"

"But after all, from his point of view, you must see—" Stiles, however, did not want to admit that he saw; yet his face, confessed it. "All right, he's not a rat without reason. A super-sized, King Kong-type rat like Greenberg. Theo Raeken. Oh gee, golly goddamn," he said, jamming a fist into his mouth like a bawling baby, "That rat."

The Italian trio imagined a lover's crise and, placing the blame for Stiles' groanings where they felt it belonged, tut-tutted their tongues at the alpha. Derek was flattered: proud that anyone should think he was Stiles' alpha. The omega quieted when Derek offered him another cigarette. He swallowed and said: "Bless you, alpha. I don't know what I would do without you. But I've scared la merde out of the whole badge-department by saying it was because Miss Dykeroo sexually assaulted me. Yessir, I can sue them on several counts, including false arrest. If there's one thing I know it's the law."

Until then, they'd skirted mention of the omega's more sinister tribulations, and this jesting reference to them seemed appalling, pathetic, so definitely did it reveal how incapable he was of recognizing the bleak realities before him. Derek said, thinking: be strong, mature, an alpha: "Stiles. We can't treat all this as a joke. We have to make plans."

"You're too young to be stuffy. Too small. By the way, what business is it of yours?"

"You're my... my friend, at least, and I'm worried. I mean to know what you intend doing."

Stiles rubbed his nose and concentrated on the ceiling. "Today's Wednesday, isn't it? So I suppose I'll sleep until Saturday, really get a good schluffen. Saturday morning I'll skip out to the bank. Then I'll stop by the apartment and pick up a nightgown or two and my Mainbocher. Following which, I'll report to Idlewild. Where, as you damn well know, I have a perfectly fine reservation on a perfectly fine plane. And since you're such a _friend_ I'll let you wave me off. Please stop shaking your head."

"Stiles. Stiles. You can't do that."

"Et pourquoi pas? I'm not hot-footing after Danny, if that's what you suppose. But why should I waste a perfectly fine ticket? Already paid for? Besides, I've never been to Hawaii."

"Just what kind of pills have they been feeding you here? Can't you realize, you're under a criminal indictment. If they catch you jumping bail, they'll throw away the key. Even if you get away with it, you'll never be able to come home."

"Well, so, tough titty. Anyway, home is where you feel at home. I'm still not sure where that is."

"No, Stiles, it's stupid. You're innocent. You've got to stick it out."

The omega said nothing and just blew out smoke. His eyes were dilated by unhappy visions, as were Derek's: iron rooms, steel corridors of gradually closing doors. "Oh, screw it," he finally said, and stabbed out his cigarette. "I have a fair chance they won't catch me. Provided you keep your bouche fermez. Look. Don't despise me, Alpha." He put his hand over Derek's and pressed it with sudden immense sincerity. "I haven't much choice. I talked it over with the lawyer: oh, I didn't tell him anything regarding Hawaii—he'd tip the badgers himself, rather than lose his fee, to say nothing of the nickels Lydia put up for bail. Bless Lydia's heart; but once on the coast I helped her win more than ten thou in a single poker hand: we're square. No, here's the real shake: all the badgers want from me is a couple of free grabs and my services as a state's witness against Deucalion—nobody has any intention of prosecuting me, they haven't a ghost of a case. Well, I may be rotten to the core, Maude, but: testify against a friend I will not. Not if they can prove he doped Sister Kenny. My yardstick is how somebody treats me, and old Deuc, all right he wasn't absolutely white with me, say he took a slight advantage, just the same Deucalion's an okay shooter, and I'd much rather run away than help the law-boys pin him down. And to be honest, that isn't all. Certain shades of limelight wreck an omega's complexion. Even if a jury gave me the Purple Heart, this neighborhood holds no future: they'd still have up every rope from LaRue to Perona's Bar and Grill—take my word, I'd be about as welcome as Mr. Frank E. Campbell. And if you lived off my particular talents, you'd understand the kind of bankruptcy I'm describing."

A nurse, soft-shoeing into the room, advised that visiting hours were over. Stiles started to complain and was curtailed by having a thermometer popped in his mouth. But as Derek took leave, the omega unstoppered himself to say: "Do me a favor, Alpha. Poke around my apartment till you find that medal you gave me. The St. Christopher. I'll need it." 


	14. Chapter 14

The sky was red Friday night, it thundered, and Saturday, departing day, the city swayed in a squall-like downpour. Sharks might have swum through the air, though it seemed improbable a plane could penetrate it. But Stiles, ignoring Derek's cheerful conviction that his flight would not go, continued his preparations—placing, the chief burden of them on the alpha. For he had decided it would be unwise of him to come near the brownstone. Quite rightly, too: it was under surveillance, whether by police or reporters or other interested parties one couldn't tell—simply a man, sometimes men, who hung around the stoop. So the omega had gone from the hospital to a bank and straight then to Boyd's Bar.

 

"He don't figure he was followed," Boyd told Derek when he came with a message that Stiles wanted the Alpha to meet him there as soon as possible, a half-hour at most, bringing: "His jewelry. His guitar. Toothbrushes and stuff. And a bottle of hundred-year-old brandy: he says you'll find it hid down in the bottom of the dirty-clothes basket. Yeah, oh, and the cat. He wants the cat. But hell," he said, "I don't know if we should help him at all. He ought to be protected against himself. Me, I feel like telling the cops. Maybe if I go back and build him some drinks, maybe I can get him drunk enough to call it off."

Stumbling, skidding up and down the fire escape between Stiles' apartment and his, wind-blown and winded and wet to the bone (clawed to the bone as well, for the cat had not looked favorably upon evacuation, especially in such inclement weather) Derek managed a fast, first-rate job of assembling the omega's going-away belongings. He even found the St. Christopher's medal.

Everything was piled on the floor of Derek's room, a poignant pyramid of brassières and shiny shoes and pretty things he packed in Stiles' only suitcase. There was a mass left over that he had to put in paper grocery bags. Derek couldn't think how to carry the cat; until he thought of stuffing him in a pillowcase. Never mind why, but once the alpha walked from New Orleans to Nancy's Landing, Mississippi, just under five hundred miles. It was a light-hearted lark compared to the journey to Boyd's bar. The guitar filled with rain, rain softened the paper sacks, the sacks spilt and perfume spilled on the pavement, pearls rolled in the gutter: while the wind pushed and the cat scratched, the cat screamed—but worse, Derek was frightened, for he wanted to trap, imprison the omega, not help him leave. 

 

***

The omega said: "You're late, Alpha. Did you bring the brandy?" And the cat, released, leaped and perched on his shoulder: tail swinging like a baton conducting rhapsodic music. Stiles, too, seemed inhabited by melody, some bouncy bon voyage oompahpah. Uncorking the brandy, he said: "Alpha Boyd, sir, three glasses."

"You'll only need two," he told the omega. "I won't drink to your foolishness."

The more she cajoled him ("Ah, Alpha Boyd. Omegas don't vanish every day. Won't you toast?"), the gruffer he was: "I'll have no part of it. If you're going to hell, you'll go on your own. With no further help from me." An inaccurate statement: because seconds after he'd made it a chauffeured limousine drew up outside the bar, and Stiles, the first to notice it, put down his brandy, arched his eyebrows, as though he expected to see the District Attorney himself alight. So did Derek. And when he saw Boyd blush, Derek had to think: by God, he did call the police. But then, with burning ears, he announced: "It's nothing. One of them Carey Cadillacs. I hired it. To take you to the airport." He turned his back on us to fiddle with one of his flower arrangements.

Stiles said: "Kind, dear Alpha Boyd. Look at me."

He wouldn't. "Good-bye," he said; and, as though he were going to vomit, scurried to the men's room. The door locked.

 

***

The Carey chauffeur was a worldly specimen who accepted our slapdash luggage most civilly and remained rock-faced when, as the limousine swished uptown through a lessening rain, Stiles stripped off his clothes, the riding costume he'd never had a chance to substitute, and struggled into a change of clothes. They didn't talk: talk could have only led to argument; and also, Stiles seemed too preoccupied for conversation. He hummed to himself, swigged brandy, he leaned constantly forward to peer out the windows, as if he were hunting an address—or, Derek decided, taking a last impression of a scene he wanted to remember. It was neither of these. But this: "Stop here," he ordered the driver, and they pulled to the curb of a street in Spanish Harlem. A savage, a garish, a moody neighborhood garlanded with poster-portraits of movie stars and Madonnas. Sidewalk litterings of fruit-rind and rotted newspaper were hurled about by 25 the wind, for the wind still boomed, though the rain had hushed and there were bursts of blue in the sky. Stiles stepped out of the car; he took the cat with him. Cradling and scratching his head he asked. "What do you think? This ought to be the right kind of place for a tough guy like you. Garbage cans. Rats galore. Plenty of cat-bums to gang around with. So scram," he said, dropping the cat; and when he did not move away, instead raised his thug-face and questioned the omega with yellowish pirate-eyes, he stamped his foot: "I said beat it!" The cat just rubbed against his leg. "I said fuck off!" he shouted, then jumped back in the car, slammed the door, and: "Go," he told the driver. "Go. Go."

Derek was stunned. They'd traveled a block before the omega said anything. "I told you. We just met in the night one fall: that's all. Independents, both of us. We never made each other any promises. We never—" he said, and his voice collapsed, a tic, an invalid whiteness seized his face. The car had paused for a traffic light. Then he had the door open, he was running down the street; and Derek ran after him.

The cat was not at the corner where he'd been left. There was no one, nothing on the street except a urinating drunk and two nuns herding a file of sweet singing pups. Other children emerged from doorways and ladies leaned over their window sills to watch as Stiles darted up and down the block, ran back and forth chanting: "You. Cat. Where are you? Here, cat." He kept it up until a bumpy-skinned boy came forward dangling an old tom by the scruff of its neck: "You wants a nice kitty, Omega? Gimme a dollar." The limousine had followed them. Now Stiles let Derek steer him toward it. At the door, he hesitated; he looked at the alpha, and shuddered, he had to grip Derek's arm to stand up: "Oh, Jesus God. We did belong to each other."

"The whole time." Derek agreed. Then he made the omega a promise, said he'd come back and find his cat.

Stiles smiled: that cheerless new pinch of a smile. "But what about me?" he said, whispered, and shivered again. "I'm very scared, Alpha. Yes, at last. Because it could go on forever. Not knowing what's yours until you've thrown it away. The mean reds, they're nothing. This, though: my mouth's so dry, if my life depended on it I couldn't spit."

"I'll take care of you, give you a home. If you'll just let me. It won't cage you. I promise."

Stiles touched his face; his fingers tested the reality of his chin, his beard stubble. "Hello, Mate," he said gently and kissed him.

"Hello, Mate" Derek repeated happily, as he lifted the omega off his feet in a rib-crushing grip.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Might still add chapter 15.
> 
> Edit: or apparently I've started working on a lot more than just that since I feel like there are many vague things that probably only make sense to me...


End file.
